mrareusTAUG 1
innc
1 - L
^ J
AN INTRODUCTORY
HISTORY OF ENGLAND
VOL. Ill
rfj
*r
AN INTRODUCTORY
HISTORY OF ENGLAND
FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE
BEGINNING OF THE GREAT WAR
BY C. R. L. FLETCHER
FORMERLY FELLOW OF ALL SOULS AND MAGDALEN COLLEGES, OXFORD
WITH MAPS
£
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. > ,
1909
4,
3>k
1905"
v. 3
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
-?
PREFACE
THE two Volumes now published bring to an end
my ' Introductory History of England/ I ask
pardon of my readers for having outrun the limits within
which I at first hoped to compress the work. I also ask
pardon for another change, not so much of plan as of
execution ; the book has somewhat unconsciously ' grown
up/ It began as a book for boys, and has ended as one
for young men. The fact is that certain persons, for
whom it was commenced eleven years ago, have set it
a bad example by growing up themselves.
I have, as before, to thank numerous friends for assist-
ance, and especially for careful reading of the proofs.
Whatever merit may be found in the chapter on India
is wholly due to the brilliant suggestions of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling. The Rev. W. H. Hutton, Fellow of St. John's
College, and Mr. Wakeling, Fellow of Brasenose, have
also enlightened and guided me on Indian affairs. Mr.
Pollard, Fellow of All Souls College, who was the in-
spirer of my last volume, after declaring that he ' knew
nothing about this period,' contributed some excellent
criticisms on the first four chapters. Professor Lodge
of Edinburgh took hold of my original Charles II. and,
like the gentleman in the old Scottish ballad,
hacked him into pieces sma',
until, when he came South again, I hardly knew him
vi PREFACE
for the same King. The Professor also carefully revised
the whole book.
The Rev. A. H. Johnson, Fellow of All Souls College,
went through the chapter on ' Men and Machines/
Mr. Temperley of Peterhouse, Cambridge — although in-
clined, on account of my preference for Lord Castlereagh
as against his hero, Canning, to offer me my choice of
weapons on Putney Heath — gave me some valuable notes
on various points of Eighteenth Century History. And
Mr. Moreton-Macdonald of Largie has exercised, with
his accustomed kindness, his own special function as
corrector of my style.
But my deepest obligation is to my old pupil
Mr. Christopher Atkinson, Fellow of Exeter College.
His colossal stores of learning on the History of the
British Army and the British Navy have been put wholly
at my disposal, and, if these volumes are not a complete
failure in their treatment of these matters, it is entirely
due to him. May I be allowed to remind him that many
people as well as myself regard the excessive modesty,
which prevents him from giving to the World the fruits
of his researches, as a positive crime ?
Oxford, Easter, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE RESTORATION
Difficulties of Historians — Historical ' Legends ' — Character of
Charles II. — Charles and his Parliaments — Temper of the Country
— Material prosperity — Foreign commerce — Balance of trade —
Freedom of trade — State of London — Literature — Science —
Law — The Army — Amnesty and exceptions — Restoration of
Property — The Revenue — The Religious Settlement — Acts against
Dissenters — Clarendon's Ministry — Plague and Fire — First Dutch
War — The Navy in 1665 — Peace concluded, 1667 — Fall of
Clarendon — Origin of National Debt — Secret Treaty with France
— Second Dutch War — The Test Act, 1673 — Origin of Whig
Party — Shaftesbury's strength — Danby, Lord Treasurer — Violence
of Whigs— Attitude of Louis XIV.— The Popish " Plot,"
1678 — Factiousness of Whigs — Skill of Halifax — The Exclusion
Bill, 1679 — Whigs and Tories — Results of the " Plot " — Danger
of Civil War — Oxford in 168 1 — The Oxford Parliament — Charles
saves the Crown — Arrest of Shaftesbury — The Rye House Plot
— Death of Charles II., 1685 pp. 1-55
CHAPTER II
1 JESUITS AND OTHER WICKED PERSONS '
Character of James II. — Lord Sunderland — William of Orange —
James' Parliament — Monmouth's Rebellion — The Catholic Ques-
tion — The Ecclesiastical Commission — Magdalen College, Oxford
— James and the Dissenters — Parliament to be swamped — ' In te
spes unica ' — The Seven Bishops — Birth of the Prince of Wales,
1688 — Invitation to William — William's chances — James' chances
Landing of William, November 5th — Advance of William —
Helplessness of James — Flight of James . . .pp. 56-76
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER III
' JE MAINTIENDRAI '
The Convention Meets, 1689 — William and Mary, King and
Queen — The Bill of Rights, 1689 — The Non- Jurors — Character
of Mary — Character of William — Statesmanship of William —
Temper of Parliaments — Settlement of the Revenue — The
Financial System — Economic changes — National Debt — The Bank
of England — The Standing Army — Factiousness of Parliament
— Party cries — Dearth of Statesmen — An evil gang — The Grand
Alliance — Battle of Cape La Hogue, 1692 — Maritime affairs —
The war in Flanders, 1692 and 1693 — The Peace of Ryswick,
1697 — The Spanish Succession, 1700 — Infatuation of Parliament
— Death of James II. — Death of William III., 1702 — The Act of
Settlement, 1700 pp. 77-109
CHAPTER IV
' GOOD QUEEN ANNE '
Character of Anne — State of society — Amusements — A ' Modern '
Age — Literature — Dr. Jonathan Swift — The Duke of Marl-
borough — Objects of the War, 1702-13 — Marlborough's advan-
tages — The Allies — The British Army — The Duke in the field —
Campaigns of 1702-3 and 1704 — Marlborough on the Danube —
Battle of Blenheim, 1704-yLord Peterborough in Spain — Marl-
borough's Campaign of 1705 — Ramillies and its results, 1706 —
Opinion in England, 1707 — Campaign of 1707 — Battle of
Oudenarde, 1708 — Siege of Lille — Tory reaction — Negotiations with
France — Battle of Malplaquet, 1709 — Dr. Sacheverell — Marl-
borough's last campaigns, 1710-11 — A Tory Ministry, 1710 — St.
John and Harley — ' Peace at any Price' — Peace of Utrecht, 1713
— The Free Trade Clauses — The English Succession — King James
or King George ? — Death of Anne, 1714. . . pp. 110-148
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF w(H)lGS
The Eighteenth Century spirit — King George I. — George, Prince of
Wales — Literature and politics — Whiggery triumphant — Parlia-
mentary corruption — Limitations to Whiggery — Foreign politics,
1714-30 — France, Spain and Austria — Electorate of Hanover
— The London of George I. — Ministerial changes — The South
Sea Bubble — Sir Robert Walpole — Walpole's foreign policy
Accession of George II., 1727 — The opposition to Walpole —
Lord Carteret — Elements of the Opposition — Walpole's finance
CONTENTS ix
— The Excise Scheme, 1733 — Danger from Spain — War with
Spain, 1739 — Fall of Walpole, 1742 — The Continental Crisis,
1740-41 — France and Prussia — Carteret's Ministry, 1742 — The
Campaign of Dettingen, 1743 — The Battle of Dettingen, 1743 —
Schemes of Carteret — The Pelham Ministry, 1744 — The war in
Flanders, 1745-48 — William Pitt — Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle,
1748 — The years of peace, 1748-56 — Death of Henry Pelham,
1754 pp. 149-186
CHAPTER VI
THE SEA-QUEEN WAKES
The American Colonies — French Canada — Previous wars in America
— Spanish America — Questions at issue, 1749 — European politics,
1749-54 — Braddock in Virginia, 1755 — Braddock's defeat —
New Alliances, 1756 — William Pitt to the front — Fall of Minorca,
1756 — Pitt's First Ministry, 1756 — Pitt dismissed, April, 1757 —
Pitt's Second Ministry, June, 1757 — Prussia on the defensive —
Pitt's first measures — The war in America, 1758 — Canada on the
defensive — Capture of Louisburg, 1758 — Britain still in danger,
1758 — Wolfe in Canada, 1759 — Attack on Quebec, 1759 — Wolfe's
victory and death, 1759 — Capture of Quebec — The war in Canada,
1 759-6o — Battle of Minden, 1759 — Hawke and Conflans, 1759
— Ferdinand in Westphalia, 1760 — Winning of Canada, 1760 —
Fresh victories, 1761 — Shall we fight Spain, 1761 ? — The Spanish
War, 1762 — Capture of Havana, 1762 — Newcastle and Bute,
1762 — Peace of Paris, 1763 — Results of the Peace, 1763 — The
French Navy pp. 187-226
CHAPTER VII
'AN END OF AN AULD SANG* (SCOTLAND, 1660-I745)
Temper of Scotland, 1660 — The question of Revenge — The Kirk
Question — ' Whigs ' and ' Tories ' — The Bishops — Repression
and Rebellion — Policy of Lauderdale — The Conventicles — The
Indulgence — The Rising of 1679 — The Duke of York in Scotland,
1680 — Scottish Exiles in Holland — Accession of James VII. —
James' Folly — The Revolution of 1689 — The Non-Jurors — Dundee
in the Highlands, 1690 — The Jacobite Clans — The Massacre of
Glencoe, 1692 — Settlement of the Kirk — Commercial grievances
— The Darien Scheme — Failure of the Darien Scheme — Inde-
pendent spirit of Scotland — Commissioners for Union, 1702 — The
last Scottish Parliament, 1703 — The Union, 1707 — ' An end
of an auld sang ' — Results of the Union — The Jacobites' King —
Chances for James, 171 5 — The Rising of 171 5 — Mistakes of the
Jacobites — End of the Rising — The Cause alive— Prince
x CONTENTS
Charles Edward — Charles Edward in France, 1744 — Charles
Edward's landing, 1745 — The Rising of 1745 — Advance of Charles
— Battle of Prestonpans — The Jacobite Army — A perilous Cause
— Advance into England — At Derby, December 6th — The retreat
from Derby — The retreat to the Highlands — Battle of Culloden
— The Prince's escape — The end of the Cause — A changing
Scotland — The new Scotland ..... pp. 227-281
CHAPTER VIII
THE LOSS OF AMERICA
Character of George III. — Objects of George III. — Means adopted by
George III. — The Whig Groups — Main Periods of the Reign —
John Wilkes — Origin of the Quarrel with America — Real inten-
tions of the Americans — Disloyalty of the American leaders —
Effects of the Stamp Act, 1764 — Ministerial changes, 1765-6 —
Lord Chatham's bombast — Fresh agitation in America, 1768-70
— Lord North's Ministry, 1770 — Open rebellion in America,
1774 — War in sight, 1774 — Howe and Washington — Declaration
of Independence, 1776 — Our chances of success — Treasonable
attitude of the Whigs — Chances of American success — Will France
help America ? — Saratoga, 1777 — France will help America,
1778 — Spain and Holland declare war, 1779-80 — What France
effected, 1778-81 — Cornwallis and Clinton — Yorktown, 1781 —
Weakness of North's Government — The Gordon Riots — The
Naval War, 1778 — Naval Strategy — Dangers of Britain — Eliott's
defence of Gibraltar, 1778-81 — The West Indian Campaigns —
Rodney's victory, 1782 — Fall of North, 1782 — Rockingham and
Shelburne, 1782-3 — The infamous Coalition, 1783 — The Peace of
Versailles, 1783 pp. 282-322
CHAPTER IX
THE PILOT
The King and the Coalition, 1784 — William Pitt's Ministry — Character
of Pitt — Pitt's colleagues — Pitt's financial policy — Towards Free
Trade — Parliamentary Reform — The Electoral System — Rise of
Radicalism — Pitt's Reform Bill, 1785 — Dangers of Reform —
The Regency Question, 1788 — The calm before the Storm —
Foreign policy, 1784-91 pp. 3 2 3~33 8
INDEX pp. 339-37 2
**
LIST OF MAPS
the. world Facing p. i
THE LOW COUNTRIES ....... ,, 1 18
EUROPE ,, 208
THE BRITISH ISLES ,, 280
NORTH AMERICA ,, 320
Ml WOMILB
London; John Murray, .Albemarle St.
Stanford* GtoaraphicalSstab.j
AN INTRODUCTORY
HISTORY OF ENGLAND
1660 — 1792
CHAPTER I
THE RESTORATION
Mr. Green has well said that the entry of Charles II.
into London marks the commencement of the life of
Modern England, the life which we live and know. The
Age of Heroics is over, and the Age of Common Sense
begins. Our habits of thought and speech become
attuned to this ; we become apt to speak slightingly of
great things, though we may not always feel indifferent
to them. The ways of society become modern ; the
aristocracy is less strenuous, the middle classes less
educated, the lower classes more unrest ful, the boundaries
between classes more sharply defined. Internally there
are fewer great quarrels, many more little squabbles.
There are no more great Kings ; the nearest approach
to a great King is a foreigner. In Parliament Party is
in a fair way to become faction, and, before the Age of
Common Sense gives way to the (present) Age of Hysterics,
it has become faction. Kings early become the play-
VOL. Ill 1
2 DIFFICULTIES OF HISTORIANS
things of this spirit of faction; soon all other interests
of the State, great and small, will also become its play-
things. The result will be that national unity will be.
split and squandered, and national efficiency arrested.
As the centuries pass it becomes increasingly difficult
for a historian to arrive at a critical judgment on
events. Little as we know of the facts of the Middle
Ages, the few facts that we know are fairly plain and we
all draw pretty much the same inferences from them.
About the Heroic Age, i.e. the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, we know a good deal, and on the whole the
judgments of reasonable men about them do not differ
very much. But as for the period before us, which I
have called the Age of Common Sense, though we know
or can ascertain all the main facts clearly, our judgments
are likely to differ very much more ; there are some
people who would not even admit it to have been an
Age of Common Sense. The biographer of the late Lord
Granville says, "The final judgment on the affairs of a
bygone period has to be founded on something besides
the critical study of State papers and the accurate
comparison of the dates of the despatches of ministers,
which frequently afford but an imperfect and soulless
record, and are not the true key to the ideas and passions
from which spring the great events of history." And
this is admirably true. The true key, however, can only
be employed by those very few persons who possess the
faculty of acquiring all the knowledge possible on a
period, and then bringing everything within it to the
test of reason and expediency. Now, if I may be allowed
an Irish bull, it 's impossible for any one man to acquire
all the knowledge possible on the Eighteenth Century, and
of course infinitely more impossible in the case of the
HISTORICAL 'LEGENDS 1 3
Nineteenth. Moreover, the nearer we get to our own
time the more we shall inevitably, though unconsciously,
be under the influence of ' legends ' ; some wonderful
man, some Clarendon or.Macaulay, endowed with un-
rivalled gifts of style, has some political cause to serve,
and he sets to work to write a history of his own time,
or of a time near to his own, in order to inflame the
passions of his readers in favour of his own cause. And,
as Lord Granville's biographer would probably acknow-
ledge, these will be the histories men will read ; the
legends indeed are apt to crumble when the scientific
historian comes along and ' compares the dates of des-
patches,' etc ; but I am inclined to think that the life of
a really great historical legend may easily run into a
couple of centuries. Alas ! I am no scientific historian ;
but I am also no creator of legends : my only legend is
that of Diva Britannia ; the other legends which would
have tempted me are dead beyond recall. Therefore,
though I think clearly and feel strongly on many
questions of Eighteenth Century politics, I shall try
to limit myself to presenting the facts as simply as
possible, and telling my readers to stand by and to
suspend their judgment on the legends.
It seems to me that four things were [ restored ' in
1660 : and of these the first was Parliamentary Govern-
ment, the expression of the will of the old Constituencies.
No solution of the ' Problem of Sovereignty,' so often
tossed up during the recent strife, was devised ; but it
was tolerably certain that the Houses would be stronger
and the Crown weaker than before the strife. Next was
restored Property and the Rule of the Common Law.
This had not been very seriously upset, but it had been
at least endangered, and some wild talk had been flying
4 CHARACTER OF CHARLES II.
about. Thirdly the Church was restored, and restored
in a form differing little in externals from Laud's church,
but entirely without the aggressive sacerdotal spirit of
that church ; it was to be the church of sober common
sense in religious matters. Lastly, as the best guarantee
for all these things, was restored, with all its old external
splendour, with all the vague and historic magic of its
name, the Crown.
Cynical, kindly, immoral, keen-witted and a thorough
modern ' man of the world,' Charles II. had the slackest
notions of religion, indeed the slackest notions of every-
thing. His political creed was almost that of a later
statesman, ' that there was nothing new, nothing true
and that nothing very much mattered,' except indeed
that he did not intend to go on his travels again. An ill-
educated man who seldom opened a book, he was yet, in
the best and worst senses of the word, clever ; he delighted
to pick the brains of others in conversation, and often
picked them to much purpose. He was far too clever to
refuse the opportunities which his factious Parliaments
often gave him of thwarting them ; occasionally they
beat him badly, as in 1673, but, if he knew when he must
give way, he also knew when the game was in his hands ;
he then played it with some gusto, and, in the great crisis
of 1678-81, with consummate skill and coolness, which
proves him to have possessed statecraft, if not states-
manship, of a very high order. But always he played it
as a game ; he had no sort of belief in his own divine
right, though it was preached at him with great vigour by
most of his clergy — who can hardly have believed it
themselves ; it was to them an excellent political ' cry,'
and that was all. Yet it would, I think, be a mistake to
imagine Charles merely as an idle, dissolute fellow, who
CHARACTER OF CHARLES II. 5
sauntered through life with an epigram on his lips and
took no interest in the business of governing. 1 He was
neither a drinker nor a gambler, though he spent much of
his time at Newmarket watching horse-races and foot-
races, or hawking and hunting ; he was fond of walking
from Whitehall to Hampton Court, and he took ver}'
scrupulous care of his own health. His immorality has,
I suspect, been very much exaggerated, perhaps because
it was so openly displayed and set such a bad example
to his courtiers ; and his activity has been accordingly
underrated. He took the keenest interest in physical
science and all experimental philosophy, in all matters
concerning trade, the Navy and the Colonies, and above
all in foreign politics. In this last branch of his duties he
fought his Parliaments, when they disagreed with him,
more tenaciously and more successfully than he fought
them on matters of religious toleration. The House of
Lords, in which he was frequently to be seen warming
his long legs at the fire, with a knot of Peers listening to
his stories, was, he declared, ' as diverting as a play.'
He was an excellent chairman of his Privy Council. But
he was a lax administrator, and had none of the Tudor
gift of looking into detail himself ; and, as none of those
who worked under him were in the least afraid of him,
he was often badly served. No really great names come
to the front in politics during the reign ; that of George
Savile, Marquis of Halifax, is probably the greatest, and
he is so far typical of the age that he works ostensibly for
no great cause, and is mainly occupied in trimming be-
1 " Charles II.," says Defoe, " was perhaps, of all kings that
ever reigned, the Prince that best understood the country and
the people that he governed . . . the best acquainted with the
World of all the Princes of his age."
6 CHARLES AND HIS PARLIAMENTS
tween the extremes of either party : he will serve England
whether it be under King Charles, King James or King
William. This is in truth a great Cause, and in 1689
ultimately triumphs : but to its contemporaries it
appeared an obscure one ; men require a name to conjure
with, a fetish to worship, somewhat more visible ; and,
in the absence of a great cause, men's moral levels
sink.
The Parliaments of Charles II. are mainly excited on
questions of religion and foreign politics, and in these they
are a faithful reflection of the intelligence of the country.
The Great Strife has left behind it as its main legacy an
entire detestation of Popery ; and a King who has spent
much of his eleven years of exile in Popish countries
will soon become to Parliaments an object of suspicion.
But the Parliaments and the country are torn in half by
two contrary desires ; that of resisting the spread of
Popery as represented by Louis XIV. of France, and that
of crippling our commercial rivals the Dutch. Charles
was entirely with his people in the latter of these objects ;
and he also saw, as they did not, that it could not be
pursued simultaneously with the former, on which he was
anything but keen. If any religion attracted him it was
Catholicism, and he probably died a Roman Catholic.
But he was not likely to run risks for that or any other
form of faith : his grandfather (Henri IV. of France)
said, 1 ' Paris is worth a mass ' ; Charles thought that the
Crown of England was worth abstention from the mass.
If any country attracted him both on the intellectual,
and also on the administrative side, it was France. For
that self-worshipping prig and bore Louis XIV. he is
1 Or is reputed to have said ; there is as little authority for
this as for many other famous French bons mots.
TEMPER OF THE COUNTRY 7
not likely to have felt any personal regard ; but the
bore's Court was the centre of European civilization and
urbanity ; and Charles was cynically ready to take large
bribes from the bore, and then to evade fulfilling the
considerations for which they had been given. He was
' paid, not sold ' ; some statesmen have been sold without
being paid. On the whole Charles did not play the
hand badly for England. Holland, though not actually
beaten in the two great wars of the reign, gradually
ceased after them to be a first-class Power, which comes
to much the same thing ; soon afterwards she became
the little boat towed in the wake of the big English ship.
To suppose that the country at large was much affected
by the immorality of the Court or by the cynical game of
party politics would be a very great mistake. Loyalty
to the Crown was the most conspicuous feeling, and
' Church and King ' the most cherished toast of the sons
and grandsons of the very men who had fought against
Charles I. and Laud. Dread of Popery made it, of course,
increasingly difficult to drink the toast in the days of
James II., but loyalty would probably have triumphed
even then if James had not added to his Popery the
misfortune of being -an immeasurable ass. Commercial
and agricultural prosperity were no longer accompanied,
as in the days before the war, by ' over-government ' ;
subject to certain protective Acts of Parliament, you
were allowed to grow rich in your own way, and to
employ your capital where you pleased. Indeed the
decay of the Privy Council is one of the most interesting
results of the Great Rebellion ; all its judicial powers
were gone, and all its supervision, so admirably exercised
in Tudor times over corporations and trading companies,
over Justices of the Peace and local authorities generally.
8 MATERIAL PROSPERITY
The result was that local authorities did much as they
pleased until the creation of ' Boards ' and ' Departments
of Government ' in the Nineteenth Century. The Privy
Council had, it is true, a Committee for ' trade and
plantations ' (i.e. Colonies), and valuable expert advice
was often given to it by colonists, merchants and bankers ;
but Parliament usurped the supremacy over this body,
as indeed it was usurping control of all the executive
government. Whether Parliament was a fit assembly
to discuss questions of the development of material
progress is open to doubt ; but unquestionably it reflected
the ideas of the intelligent classes of the day on this
subject. And unquestionably the reign of Charles II.
saw a great increase of English commerce and prosperity.
Statistics are both tiresome and fallacious, but it is
worth remembering that our exports doubled during this
reign from two to four million pounds' worth ; they did
not double again till 1740. And, with a population of
barely five millions, of which three-fourths were still
' agricultural persons ' of some sort or other, this figure
was not bad. At the end of the reign we had actually
became a corn-exporting country, and a law was passed
in 1689 giving a ' bounty ' on export (i.e. a lump sum of
money paid down to the exporter) when the price was
less than forty-eight shillings per quarter. And this was
before the introduction of scientific farming on any
serious scale. High roads were, it is true, beginning to
be largely improved ; the first Turnpike Act dates from
1663. Rents don't seem to have increased much, but
they were always going up a little ; arable might average
5s. 6d. per acre, good meadow land 8s. 6d. Wages,
too, were going up steadily, and the Justices no longer
bothered themselves to regulate them ; agricultural
FOREIGN COMMERCE 9
wages were, in the best counties, nearly tenpence a day
before Charles died. Pauperism, on the other hand, was
increasing very much, and, as each parish had to provide
for ' its own ' poor, it became the first object of the
overseer to shift on to another parish any man who was
likely to become chargeable to the rates. Hence came
endless quarrels about ' settlement,' and Laws of Settle-
ment were passed denning how a man could become
entitled to relief in a particular parish. This curious
phenomenon of the increase of prosperity side by side
with the increase of pauperism is one of the most
disappointing in English history.
It is to foreign commerce that the riches of the
period were mainly due. The marriage of King Charles
with Katharine of Portugal not only introduced us
to coffee and to tea — a drink ' good for colds and
defluxions ' as Mrs. Pepys' ' potticary ' told her — and to
the strong red poison called Oporto wine, but also brought
us Bombay and Tangier, and, indirectly, a share in the
gold and silver dug from the mines of Brazil. It was the
golden age of the East India Company, of the Hudson
Bay and the Levant Companies. These were the only
three ' monopolistic [ companies left, and no new ones
were created, 1 Parliament preferring to foster existing
trade by an elaborate system of protective duties rather
than to push it by attempts to create new branches.
And so ' joint stock [ companies sprang up in London
1 The African Company, reconstructed in 1672, is more appa-
rently than really an exception to this rule ; from the first the
1 Interlopers/ i.e. traders who did not hold shares in it, undersold
its members on the Guinea coast, and the monopoly which it
claimed had no parliamentary sanction ; in 1698 Parliament
definitely declared the trade to be free.
io BALANCE OF TRADE
for the monopoly of all sorts of trades ; but these pos-
sessed no monopoly of the trade they exercised, and were
governed by no rules except those of their own making.
The Dutch and French were our two great rivals, and,
if we gradually began to push them both out, it was
mainly because of the freedom from government regula-
tions which British subjects enjoyed. On the whole the
principle laid down, to which all laws until the close of the
Eighteenth Century were intended to conform, was that
known as the ' Balance of Trade ' ; let this country
export more goods than it imports, and it will get the
balance paid to it in gold and silver, which it still foolishly
thought to be the only real wealth. One or two people
saw further ; Sir William Petty (' Treatise of Taxes,' 1662)
said that * labour is the father and land the mother of all
wealth.' Nicholas Barbon or Barebones, son of our old
friend Praise-God, was a true free trader ; ' there can be
no import without an export to pay for it,' said he. Sir
Dudley North was another forerunner of free trade.
But the ruling spirits were men like Thomas Mun 1 and
Sir Josiah Child (founder of a bank which still exists),
and to them a Balance, owed and paid to this country in
gold and silver, was the law and the prophets.
The only really new industry planted in England was
that of silk weaving, largely recruited from French
Protestants whom the stupid bigotry of Louis XIV. was
driving out : these settled principally in the East End of
London ; they taught us also, to the disgust of English
weavers who rioted and broke their looms, many new
tricks in linen weaving, and they introduced ox-tail
1 Mun died in 1641, but his great work, ' Englands Treasure in
Foreign Trade,' was only published by his son in 1664, and was
more read than that of any contemporary economist.
FREEDOM OF TRADE n
soup. The only seriously new branch of foreign trade
was the Slave Trade, which developed, from the ports of
Bristol, Liverpool and London, to an enormous extent.
The growth of London at the expense of all the smaller
ports of the East and South coast is one of the most
curious features of modern English history ; for, if you
look at it reflectively, you will see that London faces
the narrow seas and not the high seas ; its early great-
ness dates from the days when our main trade was with
Bruges, Antwerp and North Germany, and you would
have expected that, when commerce became oceanic,
some Western port would have taken its place. But
the exact reverse came about, and London now began
to replace Amsterdam as \ the Exchange of the World,'
whatever that high-sounding phrase (repeated in all
good books) may mean.
All this extension of commerce was, however, not
without its drawbacks. The old Privy Council had tried
to ensure that manufacturers should produce good
articles, whereas, now that there was no supervision, the
' age of shoddy ' had begun : France, our special rival
in the Levant, perhaps taught us this game ; she was
already stamping her cloth ' Drap de Londres,' in order
to deceive the confiding Turk at Aleppo. And if the
regulations of the old Privy Council had tended to cramp
trade, they had at least tended to force it into channels
conducive to national power rather than to mere wealth ;
but from this time onwards there was a dangerous
temptation to assume that wealth and power are syn-
onymous, which they are not. Woe to the Nation that
prefers dividends to power ! and treble woe to the Nation
that believes dividends and power to be the same thing !
Still, as long as the Navigation Acts, carefully re-enacted
12 STATE OF LONDON
by Charles II., were maintained in full force, the supply of
sailors and ships for the Navy would never fail ; and as
long as England fed herself from her own soil, the supply
of ploughboys to fight in her Armies would not wholly
fail.
To a certain extent the period saw the beginning of
the supremacy of town over country ; it soon became
the fashion for the upper classes, even when unconnected
with the Court, to spend a portion of the year in London,
usually in a hired house or lodgings : ' flying coaches,'
performing journeys of fifty miles a day for ten shillings
per passenger, made travelling a comparatively easy
matter. But as late as 1715 it was still a twelve days'
journey from London to Bodmin; Lady Essex Robartes
undertakes it 'with great fear.' Even London streets
were not over safe ; they were still very ill paved and
lighted, and ' gentlemen of the road ' did a roaring
trade in the suburbs, for police simply did not exist, and
the watchmen were useless. The Duke of Ormond was
assaulted in St. James' Street and carried almost to
Tyburn by a notorious ruffian called Blood, who seems to
have intended to hang him. The Thames, however, was
still the great highway of London, whether for business or
pleasure, and was still silver, though the use of coal in
place of wood was soon to make the capital smoky ;
people seldom crossed London Bridge on foot, though it
was a favourite amusement to watch adventurous fellows
in skiffs ' shooting the bridge,' i.e. the rapids made in the
tideway by its numerous arches with their clumsy pedi-
ments. Few Londoners, I imagine, kept a ' yatch ' of
their own as Roger North did, but, when Mr. Pepys
had Navy business at Greenwich or Deptford, he nearly
always went by water, though he was afraid of shooting
LITERATURE 13
the bridge. You could walk in safety in ' Foxhall '
Gardens and hear the nightingales sing ; you could
go and gape at Charles feeding his ducks and teaching
his spaniels to swim in St. James' Park ; your wives
and daughters could walk in the Ring in Hyde Park
and see the grand company in their coaches ' doing the
proper thing ' and looking, one hopes, less bored than
they do to-day. You could read the London Gazette, the
oldest still-existing newspaper, which began life as the
Oxford Gazette in the Plague year. Above all, for
the price of a cup of coffee in the great coffee house
in Covent Garden, you could hear the first wits of
the day conversing. You were more likely to hear
them quoting Butler's ' Hudibras ' than either of the
three masterpieces of John Milton. Yet Mr. Dryden,
whose great poems on the ' Annus Mirabilis ' of 1666 won
him the Laureateship in 1670, would tell you that the
blind poet of Bunhill Fields, some of whose works had
been burnt by the hangman in 1661, had just published
(1667) a poem called ' Paradise Lost/ ' which cuts us
all out and the Ancients too.' ' Paradise Regained '
and ' Samson Agonist es ' followed in 1671. The
Theatre, to which the Court is passionately devoted, is
not to be commended, though Mr. Dryden himself writes
for it, as well as Etherege, Wycherley, Sedley and others
whose comedies are not fit for young persons to read ;
now for the first time female parts on the stage are taken
by women, and the reputation of actresses is not good.
Before the end of the reign you may hear at the
Chapel Royal some of the anthems, and in ' chamber
concerts ' other pieces of the greatest of English musical
composers, Henry Purcell.
But, in spite of Milton and Dryden, the bent of the
14 SCIENCE
best minds of the age is to mathematics and natural
science, sometimes, as in the case of the great scholars
Dr. Wilkins and Dr. Willis, to science flavoured with
theology ; oftener with antiquarianism. It is pre-
eminently an age of accurate research and proof, as
well as of speculation. The Society of which we saw
the origin at Oxford in our last volume, now becomes
the ' Royal Society,' which we still know, and member-
ship of it becomes the highest honour which Science
has to bestow. Prince Rupert, in the intervals of
perfecting guns and gunpowder, is studying mezzotint
engraving and imparting its secrets to John Evelyn, who
will publish an account of it in his ' Sculptura.' 1
Wood, Ashmole and Plot are making Oxford famous as
the home of antiquarian investigations ; Sir William
Dugdale, the Herald, is editing his vast collections on
the history of the Monasteries, and incurring suspicion
of Popery for mentioning such things ; and, though the
University may burn as seditious the works of Thomas
Hobbes and George Buchanan, the influence of Hobbes
has permeated everywhere, and, to him who has read
Hobbes, Divine Right may remain a pious opinion, but
Contract seems to be a surer basis for government. Isaac
Newton was just twenty-four when he sat under an apple
tree at Woolsthorpe in 1666 and observed an apple fall ;
he decided that it must have fallen owing to the ' attrac-
tion of the earth,' and in 1687 published the ' Principia,'
which revolutionized natural science. He was also soon
to invent a terrible thing called an ' infinitesimal calculus,'
for which it is difficult for any non-mathematician to
pardon him. Among preachers and divines were South,
1 Rupert is also traditionally credited with the invention of
some sort of steam engine.
LAW 15
Stillingfleet and Barrow, and the saintly Ken, whom
Charles II. rewarded with a bishopric for rebuking his
immoral life. Men were reading Baxter's • Saints Rest '
and Bunyan's ' Holy War ' and ' Pilgrim's Progress,'
however sound might be their churchmanship ; above
all, every one was reading that wonderful anonymous
book called ' The Whole Duty of Man.'
I have mentioned these points merely to show that
the popular conception of the age, as an immoral and
vulgar one, is very far from the truth. And there is
another point also to which attention must be called ;
if it was an age of bad government, it was an age of good
law and good lawyers. Sir Matthew Hale, successively
Chief Baron and Chief Justice, did much, by his judg-
ments as well as his writings, to elucidate the principles
of the Common Law. Sir Heneage Finch, Lord Chan-
cellor in 1673, was the first specialist in the rules of
Equity, and the first to reduce these rules to a system.
Our Contract Law still rests largely upon the great
' Statute of Frauds ' ; our system of administering
estates on the ' Statute of Distributions.' Free bequest
of all landed property was made possible by the Act
which abolished the feudal tenures ; the worst page of
our Statute Book was torn out by the repeal of the Act
of Mary for burning heretics. The Habeas Corpus Act of
1679 put upon a sound statutory basis the old Common
Law right of every accused person to be brought to trial at
the earliest opportunity. The criminal trials, especially at
the end of Charles' reign, have a bad reputation from the
violent language employed by Chief Justices Scroggs and
Jeffreys ; but, if we examine these trials fairly, we shall
see that they were in many respects distinctly better
conducted than such matters were before the Civil War.
16 THE ARMY
It is true that the law of evidence was in its infancy, and
that, in a trial for treason, the guilt of the accused was
always assumed until he could prove his innocence. But
he was no longer subject to a preliminary and private
examination ; he could now claim to be confronted with
witnesses, to cross-examine them and to call witnesses
on his own behalf. Finally, to this reign belongs the
great ruling (in Bushell's case, 1670) that a jury is not
responsible to any man for the verdict it gives.
But it is time to turn to * Political History.' Much
of what is technically called the ' Restoration Settlement '
was the work of the Convention which Monk had called
in April, '60, and which continued to sit till the end of the
year ; but, when this body was dissolved, some of the
questions were still unsettled and so remained over for
the first Parliament of King Charles, commonly called ' the
Long Parliament of the Restoration,' which met in May,
1661, and sat on until 1679. On the whole I think we
shall be impressed by the essentially fair character of the
settlement ; nobody was perfectly satisfied with it, which
is not a bad criterion of its fairness. Perhaps the first and
most immediately pressing question was, what was to be
done with the Army ? ' Oh, get rid of it,' said everybody.
Among all the things that the Restoration meant, it
meant most of all the triumph of civilian over soldier, and
of sober man over fanatic. To throw away an Army of
65,000 men, the finest fighting machine in the Europe of
the day, was surely an astonishing waste, yet it was a
waste imperatively demanded by public opinion. The
deep hatred of soldiers, which Cromwell's Army had excited,
remained ingrained in English minds for over a century ;
to some extent an aftertaste of that hatred remains and
paralyses England still. The disbandment was a very
THE ARMY t;
difficult transaction to carry through, for there were
large arrears of pay to be met, but by the end of 1660 it
had been all but completed : the revival of trade which
accompanied the Restoration enabled the men to find
employment ; Ireland and America were calling for
sturdy Protestant colonists. A lucky little insurrection
of Fifth Monarchists, in January 1661, led to the dis«
bandment being stopped before it was completed, and
Monk's own regiment, now the ' Coldstream Guards/
was saved. To this were added a new regiment of
Guards, now the Grenadier Guards, largely made up of
returned Royalist exiles, two more troops of ' Life
Guards/ and a regiment now known as the ' Blues/
These regiments are still on our Army List. We shall
see that, during Charles' reign, considerable additions
were made to them in the teeth of public opinion ; e.g.,
the garrison of Dunkirk was, after the sale of that fortress
in 1662, sent to Tangier, which, as part of the dowry of
Charles' Queen, we retained till 1684 ; the garrison then
came home to England. A regiment of Marines was
also raised for the Dutch War in 1664. At first the Army
did not amount to above 5,000 men, well paid and, on
the whole, recruited without difficulty, although the
moral and social standard of Cromwell's Army was never
again reached ; but, as there was legally 1 no ' martial
law ' in time of peace, and no barracks, the Army of
Charles II. ought to have been a very difficult body to
keep in discipline.
The question of amnesty was second in the scale of
importance, and here we are upon less agreeable ground.
1 Charles did issue ' Articles of War ' and they seem to have
been obeyed, but they were quite unconstitutional. On the
whole, discipline does appear to have been well kept.
VOL. Ill 2
i8 AMNESTY AND EXCEPTIONS
Many cross currents of opinion have to be considered, if
we are to estimate it fairly : the current of vengeance,
the current of precaution, the current of legality, and,
strange as it may seem to us, the current of atonement.
We may dismiss at once the idea that there was any need
for precaution : nothing, of course, could guarantee the
King, or any king, against a stray dagger or bullet ; but
the Monarchy and all that it safeguarded needed at first
no precautions. Still, ' precaution ' was a useful argu-
ment to press into the service of vengeance against
the Regicides. As regards retaliation, it was regicide
alone that was to be avenged ; that was the ' Sin of the
Nation,' and the Nation really believed it to be so. Many
a humble and many a noble family had lives lost on field
or scaffold to avenge, but all had to forgo all retribution.
None were to die but those who had actually signed the
death warrant or assisted at the execution of Charles I.
The mere Law demanded that all of these should die. The
Declaration of Breda, however, had thrown the burden
of responsibility wholly on to the shoulders of the two
Houses of Parliament ; and it is obvious that the King
showed great prudence in adhering to that plan. But
the result was that those who had warm friends in these
Houses got off with minor penalties, while those who had
no friends were left to justice. There was a long and
unseemly wrangle between the Houses, and, in the end,
thirteen persons suffered death as regicides, namely ten
of the late King's judges, two Colonels who had kept
guard at the scaffold, and Hugh Peters who had preached
at it. Sir Harry Vane's execution in '62 was more
unjustifiable, except perhaps as a matter of precaution ;
he was probably the ablest and most dangerous living
republican. People betted heavily on the results of the
RESTORATION OF PROPERTY 19
trials ; John Verney, far away at Aleppo, has been
laying 30 to 3 on Vane's case. Several regicides were
imprisoned for life ; many had already escaped abroad
to Switzerland or to America. The tradition of a regi-
cide Republic, as a not unworthy ideal of government,
lingered in obscure places for many years to come,
stimulated the ' Rye House Plot ' of 1683, and was not
wholly without influence on the Revolution of 1688 ;
but when at that date the only surviving regicide exile,
Ludlow, returned to England, he was at once warned
to fly again, fled and died in disgust.
Thirdly we must consider the question of the restora-
tion of property. An immense amount of sentimental
nonsense has been talked against the settlement adopted
on this question, which was indeed eminently fair.
Those who had lost all for the Royalist cause recovered
their lands ; those who, by ' compounding ' with the
usurping Government, had made terms for themselves, at
whatever expense, recovered nothing. The former class
consisted practically only of those few who had gone into
exile, and the purchasers of the land of exiles had little
ground of complaint when they were now deprived ;
they had bought the land, so to speak, ' with all faults/
including the great probability of a return of the exiles
to power. More doubtful as a measure of statesmanship
was the restoration of the remnant of the old Crown
lands : the rents from a large estate are a very mediaeval
and uneconomic means of feeding a Government ; under
the old Common Law it was impossible to prevent the
Crown from giving its lands away, and the next three Kings
proceeded to impoverish themselves freely by so doing :
while, until such lands were taken over by the ' Woods
and Forests Office, ' they were always badly managed.
20 THE REVENUE
Fourthly, before we come to the most serious question,
that of religion, we may lump under one head the question
of the retention of the reforms of the Long Parliament ;
and, from looking at this, we shall see what a long road
had been travelled since 1640. Neither Star Chamber
nor High Commission was to come back ; the feudal
tenures were not to come back. Though the Triennial
Act was repealed in 1664, it was repealed only in order
to prevent the necessity of a new Parliament being
called every three years ; it was never for a moment
supposed that the- King would be able to do without a
Parliament. 1 On the other hand, a Statute expressly
declared that the command of all armed forces was for
ever vested in the Crown : another Statute ' of Tumul-
tuous Petitions ' laid down that not more than twelve
persons were to present any petition to King or Parlia-
ment ; this was a distinct blow at the Radical methods,
of bringing external pressure to bear on Parliament,
which Pym had favoured in 1641-2. Of similar nature
was the Licensing Act restricting the number of printers ;
this was periodically renewed with one interval till 1695,
since when authors and printers have been restrained
from publishing their thoughts only by the Law of
Libel, and by certain Acts against blasphemy and
indecency. Finally Parliament provided for the Crown
in a manner by no means liberal. Customs and Excise
(a tax copied from the Dutch in 1643) were granted
for the King's life. A hearth tax, two shillings on
every chimney of every one who was rated to the poor,
was added, and was exceedingly unpopular ; it was
1 " The sitting and holding of Parliament shall not be inter-
mitted or discontinued above three years at the most " : 16 Car.
II. c. 1.
THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENT 21
supposed to bring in £200,000 a year, and never brought
in nearly that sum ; so much was it hated that people
bricked up their chimneys and shivered rather than
pay it. The repeal of it was almost the only thing
that the middle classes demanded of William III. on
his march to London. With these grants plus the
revenue from Crown lands and Post Office, the King's
income was supposed to be £1,200,000 a year ; but, in
spite of the great increase in the Customs and Excise,
it never seems to have reached that figure except on
paper ; and it certainly never came to enough to cover
the increasing cost of living like a King, of governing
and defending the Nation. No loophole, however, was
given to the Crown for unparliamentary taxation, nor
did Charles ever attempt anything of the kind. Thus
far, on the whole, the settlement was essentially a
parliamentary one.
When we come to the religious settlement, we shall see
that here too the will of Parliament prevailed. The Con-
vention, largely Presbyterian in its membership, treated
this topic wholly from the point of view of property.
An advowson or a benefice is a freehold ; no man can
be deprived of his freehold except by a judgment at law
(see Magna Carta) ; so, if the vicar of Tubney has been
turned out of his parsonage by the usurping Government,
and one of Cromwell's chaplains put in his place, the vicar,
if alive, must be restored, whatever his religious opinions
or those of the intruded chaplain be. If, however, the
vicar is dead, and the chaplain has been presented by
the proper patron of the living, the chaplain is left there.
And this was as far as the Convention went. But this
did not protect a non-Episcopalian minister against any
future Acts an Episcopalian Parliament might pass.
22 THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENT
Now it seems as if there were two courses open to the
Government : (i) so to modify the Prayer Book and the
Episcopal constitution of the Church as to ' comprehend '
the more moderate opponents of that Church ; (ii) to
make no alteration in either, but to grant a large measure
of toleration to those who objected to either. The King
would perhaps have preferred the former plan, and his
leading Minister, Edward Hyde, now Chancellor and Earl
of Clarendon, thought at first it might be politic to do
something of the kind. A conference was called at the
Savoy whereat the leading Presbyterians met the leading
Anglicans, as a result of which some slight alterations
of the Prayer Book were made, including the introduction
of the ' General Thanksgiving.' The vacant sees were,
however, speedily filled up, and, though one Presbyterian,
Reynolds, accepted a bishopric, the other Bishops were
mostly Laudians ; Juxon went to Canterbury and Cosin
to Durham, Sheldon to London, Morley to Winchester.
And, to the surprise of both King and Chancellor, the
Parliament of 1661 appeared more Episcopal than the
Bishops, who once more took their seats in the House
of Lords. 1 The Lower House, in fact, consisted largely
of those interests which had been most outraged during
the rebellion ; and of these the Anglican Church was
the first. The cry was consequently one for rigid re-
pression of all Dissent from that Church. Not only
should there be no comprehension, but no toleration
of Dissenters. We may rejoice that there was no com-
prehension ; any serious revision of the Prayer Book
would have destroyed it, and would ultimately have
1 In the second Session of this Parliament. The Restoration
of the lands belonging to the Church as a Corporation was a
natural, but perhaps an unfortunate corollary.
THE RELIGIOUS SETTLEMENT 23
satisfied few. But it was a terrible mistake to refuse
toleration ; Dissent was far too strong to be killed by
any measure of repression ; and yet it would probably
have died out under a regime of perfect toleration.
Dissent continued to be a religious, but became also
largely a political, and even a social force, a force at the
command of any one who objected to government by
the landed classes ; and now, when that government
has gone, Dissent exists mainly as a protest against an
Established Church. If the Church were disestablished
to-morrow, the Dissenting congregations would rapidly
dwindle, for they would have nothing to dissent from, and
religion would probably perish in five-sixths of the country
districts. Toleration, granted in 1660, would have pre-
vented one of the most pernicious cleavages in modern
English society.
This High Anglican Parliament must bear the responsi-
bility, nor can it plead wholly religious motives for its
mistake. Its first Act, the Corporation Act of 1661,
imposed a political, as well as a religious test upon all
persons holding municipal office. To be an alderman or
a town councillor you had to take the Sacrament accord-
ing to the Prayer Book rite (what a blasphemous use of
the holiest act of worship !), and also to swear that it was
unlawful to resist the King upon any pretext whatever.
Now the Act was passed because aldermen and town
councillors practically elected the borough members of
Parliament. The Act of Uniformity followed in the same
Session ; every beneficed clergyman must declare his
unfeigned consent to everything in the Prayer Book,
must be reordained if he have not already received
episcopal orders, or must vacate his benefice before
August, 1662. Two thousand ministers ' came out '
24 ACTS AGAINST DISSENTERS
rather than accept the tests. Even Clarendon, High
Anglican as he was, and several of the Bishops tried to
modify this Act in the Lords. The King was very angry
at these two laws, which certainly made him eat his
promises of toleration for ' tender consciences,' and at
the end of the year he tried to get Parliament to recog-
nize his ' Dispensing ' power with a view to granting
' Indulgence ' to Dissenters. This at once raised a great
constitutional question, which will be with us more or
less till we have got rid of the Stuarts altogether : — Can
a King, by virtue of his prerogative, ' dispense with '
a particular law in a particular case ? Well, it seems
that he can ; e.g. he can certainly pardon a man for
disobedience to a law ; and there are plenty of precedents
for his doing more than that. In the hands of an un-
scrupulous King this comes to mean that he can set aside
all laws that he doesn't like and yet dare not openly veto.
For the moment Charles would not risk his great popu-
larity, and, when Parliament protested, he dropped the
attempt for the time. In '64 the Houses went on to
pass a ' Conventicle Act,' i.e. a prohibition of all public
meetings for religious worship, except according to the
Prayer Book rite, and, in the next year, a ' Five Mile
Act,' prohibiting the deprived ministers from coming
near the towns in which they had formerly ministered,
unless they would take a strong ' non-resistance ' oath
and another oath that they would never seek to alter
the government in Church and State. These Acts,
taken altogether, have got the name of the ' Clarendon
Code.' As a matter of fact Clarendon was directly
responsible for little of them ; he accepted them, perhaps
too willingly, when they had been passed ; and he
objected, on legal grounds, to the Declaration of In-
DISSENTERS 25
dulgence ; but he was certainly no persecutor, any
more than his master was, and these were persecuting
Acts.
In an England which was losing its high ideals they
probably led to a good deal of sporadic perjury.
Oaths imposed for such evidently political purposes lost
their sanctity ; many Dissenters took the Sacrament,
so to speak, ' officially. ' When the Devon Justices
actually went so far as to refuse to license alehouses
except to such publicans as could produce a certificate
that they had received the Sacrament twice during the
past year, they were reducing Tests and Sacraments
alike to an absurdity. The Conventicle Act was not
very vigorously enforced ; the famous twelve-year-long
imprisonment of the tinker, John Bunyan, began before
the Acts were passed, and the best opinion now is that he
did not write the ' Pilgrim's Progress ' (first published in
1678) in prison. Not only the bulk of the apprentices,
but many of the rich merchants of London remained
Presbyterian for more than a generation, and do not
seem to have suffered any persecution. Even in the
King's Privy Council, side by side with old Anglicans like
Ormond, Southampton and Clarendon, were Presbyterians
such as Manchester, Robartes, Northumberland and
Monk, now Duke of Albemarle. Such men were not
necessarily turncoats ; they were merely men who waived
their ideals for the sake of peace and order.
7 he real Executive Government, however, lay in the
inner ring of the Privy Council, the ' Committee for
Foreign Affairs/ sometimes called the ' Juncto,' the
' Cabal,' the ' Cabinet,' consisting of some half-dozen
persons. It met where the King pleased — often in the
drawing-room of the reigning mistress ; when Clarendon
26 CLARENDON'S MINISTRY
had the gout, as he often had, it met in his bedroom.
Anything like a ' Prime Minister ' was a very unpopular
idea ; Clarendon expressly disclaimed the title, but there
was generally one man to whom Charles confided most of
his designs, and Clarendon, though never a favourite, was
virtually Premier for seven years. During his Ministry
the most important events were the marriage of the
King with the good, if stupid, Portuguese Princess
Katharine in '62, the sale of Dunkirk to the French in the
same year, the last serious visitation of the Plague in '65,
the Great Fire of London, and the First Dutch War.
For and against the retention of Dunkirk much might
be said ; and for it especially that, although a bad
harbour, too shallow for large ships, in hostile hands it
would be certain to become a nest of privateers ; in many
subsequent Treaties with France the dismantling of its
fortifications was an English demand. But, on the other
hand, the expense of its maintenance was very serious,
and the price of its sale (£200,000) a considerable item
to an Exchequer already impoverished. The Portuguese
marriage was sensible ; it meant the maintenance of the
Cromwellian foreign policy, and a French alliance ;
Katharine brought as her dowry Tangier and Bombay,
both of which acquisitions increased the growing hostility
of the Dutch. The Plague of 1665 was probably the
most serious visitation of the kind since 1348, and the
reason seems to be that there had been hardly a
drop of rain for four months ; the city was therefore
particularly foul. It began in the Western suburbs
North of the Strand and worked its way Eastwards, and
it swept away perhaps a fifth of the half-million persons
inhabiting London and its suburbs. By June all the
carriers to the country had stopped plying ; the dearth
PLAGUE AND FIRE
27
of food and of fuel was severely felt. The Court and
the Parliament fled to Oxford. By September the deaths
were one thousand a day. There was a Lord Mayor's
Fund, as there would be . to-day, for the relief of the
sufferers. The Eastern counties also suffered severely ;
and the infection lingered about for sixteen months.
On September 1st, 1666, the Great Fire began ' in
Pudding Lane at a baker's shop where a Dutch Rogue
lay ' ; at first we were sure it was the Dutch who had
done it, but soon we changed our minds and said it was
the Papists. The service of pumpers was totally inade-
quate, though we are not told that, as at a subsequent fire
in the Temple, men tried to extinguish the flames with
beer in default of water. Carts to remove goods were
not to be had for love or money. The Lord Mayor lost
his head and ' ran about with a handkercher round his
neck, crying out, " Lord ! what can I do ? " ' The
King and courtiers, who had turned tail to the plague,
came to the rescue now, and superintended the blowing
up of houses with gunpowder, and by the 6th the fire
was stayed. Two-thirds of London were in ashes, in-
cluding St. Paul's Cathedral and fifty other churches.
This visitation had, at least, cleaned out many an un-
savoury den and prevented future plagues. If Sir
Christopher Wren's plans for the rebuilding of the city
had been accepted, twenty-four great streets would have
radiated from his new St. Paul's, and London would
have become the most beautiful, instead of the ugliest
capital in Europe ; but the London merchants were in
too great a hurry to get back to their warehouses, and
the city grew up again anyhow. 1
The First Dutch War remains, perhaps, the most im-
1 Vide infra, vol. iv. p. 183.
28 FIRST DUTCH WAR
port ant event of these seven years. Causes of quarrel were
never wanting between the two great commercial nations,
who competed with each other on the African and
American coasts as well as in the Far East. Holland
had, moreover, recently refused our mediation in her
war with Portugal. Both Clarendon and to some extent
the King l were at first averse to fighting, but the traders
of London carried the Government off its legs. Five
millions were voted for it by Parliament, and an Act was
passed specially guarding against the application of this
money to other purposes ; not an unnecessary precaution,
for when, in '68, a parliamentary audit of the accounts
was made, it was found that over one-third of this sum
had found its way to objects other than the Navy. The
war was popular at first, and hostilities on the West
African and American coasts preceded its declaration.
We captured, among other things, the city of New
Amsterdam on the Hudson River, and renamed it ' New
York.' This was in compliment to Prince James, Duke
of York, already, by his marriage with Clarendon's
daughter Anne, father of two coming Queens — Mary and
Anne — and Lord High Admiral of England. He, being
already in opposition to his father-in-law, was in favour
of war.
The Navy was by no means in a bad condition ; to
the period of this war belong the steady substitution of
' first rates ' for smaller ships, the growth of a class of
professional sailors as opposed to ' Generals at Sea,'
of which growth we have already seen the germ during
the Interregnum, and the tactical order of fighting in
1 Charles, however, was deeply interested in numerous branches
of our commerce which were feeling Dutch competition very
severely.
THE NAVY IN 1665 29
* line ahead/ close-hauled to the wind, with a definite
interval between each ship. James was a really good
administrator at the Admiralty. He introduced during
his tenure of office a regular half-pay system for officers
not in immediate employment ; he also created the
■ Victualling Yard/ He was well served by Samuel
Pepys, ' Clerk of the Acts of the Navy/ and author
of the famous Diary, and by other members of the
Board of Admiralty — such as Narborough, Deane and
Pett. But from the very first, the administration
had to fight against debt (ij- millions inherited from
the Protectorate) and impecuniosity. The contractors
were fraudulent, the food of the sailors was always
running short, and their wages often in arrear. Never-
theless, when, in March, 1665, war was declared, over
one hundred ships were ready for sea, and the best
Dutch Admiral, de Ruyter, was far away in America.
It was ' foggy Opdam ' whom James blockaded at Texel
in May, and whom he and Rupert met in the fierce
battle of Solebay, off Southwold, in June. Our victory
was complete, and James displayed conspicuous valour ;
the Dutch loss was twenty-four to one in ships, and five
to one in men. But, after the victory, the Duke went
to bed, and the remnants of the Dutch Fleet were allowed
to escape ; Hawke or Nelson would not have gone to bed.
The Plague prevented further activity that year, and,
by the opening of '66, France, which was carefully
nursing the nucleus of a Fleet at Toulon, had allied herself
with the Dutch. Monk and Rupert put to sea at the
end of May with eighty sail, but Rupert was foolishly
detached to intercept the French Fleet ; and so Monk
was left, in far inferior force, to meet de Ruyter half-
way over from the North Foreland. He fought a most
30 PEACE CONCLUDED, 1667
desperate fight for four days, on the last of which 1
Rupert, who had got as far as the Isle of Wight and
found no Frenchmen, joined him again. We lost ten
and they five ships ; in the next battle, on August 4th,
our victory was complete, and the sorely crippled Dutch
fled behind their sandbanks. Negotiations for peace
began in October, but civilian advice had prevailed over
expert advice, and, after the last battle, the King had
laid up his big ships in harbour without even taking the
precaution of fortifying the mouth of the River. And,
as the negotiations were unduly spun out, the Dutch
in the following June made a spring at Sheerness, seized
it, sailed up the Medway, and burnt sixteen of our ships
at the gates of Chatham Dockyard : the roar of their
guns could be heard and the flare of the burning vessels
seen from Whitehall ; for a month more they block-
aded the mouth of the River. Charles hastened to
conclude peace on any terms, and was lucky to be able
to retain New York and New Jersey (July, '67).
A month later Clarendon fell, a scapegoat for the
misfortunes which closed the war. Charles, with the
most heartless indifference, tossed him to his enemies
to worry, advised him cynically to fly the country, and,
when he had fled, supported his enemies in an Act for
his banishment, by which his return was to be made
high treason. To the King Clarendon had become a
bore ; he was always telling him home-truths — e.g. that
he was letting the House of Commons get too much
power, that he neglected the Queen for Lady Castle-
maine, etc. He was no great statesman ; of foreign
policy he had no grasp at all, in domestic policy he had
1 Rupert joined Monk in the late evening of the third day, but
was not engaged till the fourth.
FALL OF CLARENDON 31
drifted back towards the ideas of Strafford, whom he
had helped to the scaffold ; but he was a man of stainless
honour, and upheld the traditions of a more strenuous
and honourable age. The charges brought against him
are ridiculous, and perhaps illustrate the deterioration
of the standard of the House of Commons ; yet they are
not more ridiculous than those which Eliot brought
against Buckingham in 1626. Clarendon had no popu-
larity to fall back upon ; the ' man in the street ' believed
that he had made private profit from the sale of Dunkirk.
In his second exile in France the old Minister brought
to a close and revised his majestic ' History of the Great
Rebellion,' which he had begun in 1646 at Scilly and
Jersey. He died at Rouen in 1674.
The first period of Charles' reign was now at an end,
and in the next, that is, until 1674, it can be said that
he had no leading Minister at all. The intervening
period is usually described as that of the ' Cabal ' Ministry ;
but, in fact, this Cabal or Cabinet consisted of a shifting
body of men. Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, was
Secretary of State, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, now
Lord Ashley, was Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir
Thomas Clifford First Treasury-Commissioner ; Lauder-
dale was the oracle on Scottish affairs, and the versatile
and immoral Duke of Buckingham (son of our old friend
of 1628), though holding no executive office, was perhaps
as much consulted as any one. The Great Seal was given
to Sir Orlando Bridgman, until Ashley became Earl of
Shaftesbury and Chancellor for one year, 1672-3. Monk,
till his death in '70, and Monk's cousin Morice as Secretary
of State, Archbishop Sheldon and Brother James were all
from time to time members of the inner Cabinet. In
finance at least these gentlemen were singularly unsuc-
32 ORIGIN OF NATIONAL DEBT
cessful ; from the fall of Clarendon onwards the King
fell deeper and deeper into debt. For twenty-one months
of this period — April, 1671, to February, 1673 — Parlia-
ment was prorogued ; when it sat its Sessions were always
short and stormy, and the two Houses, by quarrelling
with each other, generally gave the King good excuse
for proroguing them. Charles lived mainly upon subsidies
from his good brother of France, to whom he made all
sorts of fine promises which he did not intend to fulfil ; also
he helped himself by a partial bankruptcy, in the shape
of a suspension, and then a reduction of the interest on a
sum of over a million borrowed from the London gold-
smiths. These tradesmen acted as bankers and money-
lenders — i.e. they received the deposits of private persons
and allowed them 5 per cent, interest ; then they lent
money to the Government, charging, in Clarendon's more
stable Ministry, 8 per cent., and after that 12 per cent.
In January, '72, Charles, by the advice of Clifford,
suspended the payment of this interest, and soon after-
wards said he would pay half of it only ; great outcry ;
the goldsmiths suspended payment of interest to their
clients also, and many people were very hard hit.
Partial repayments of interest were made in 1677 and
again in 1701, but the capital was never repaid, and
became the foundation of the ' National Debt.'
A transient ■ Triple Alliance ' was negotiated in 1668
with Holland and Sweden, which soon became a cloak
for a more serious secret Treaty with France, concluded
at Dover, after much haggling, in May, '70. By this
astonishing document, which was only gradually revealed
to, or guessed at by a few of the leading Ministers
(Shaftesbury never knew of it for certain), Charles
promised to declare himself a Catholic ' at a convenient
SECRET TREATY WITH FRANCE 33
opportunity.' If England rebelled at this, Louis was
to lend him troops ; England and France were to join
in robbing the Dutch Republic at once, and the
Spanish Monarchy on the death of the reigning Carlos II.
England's share of the latter was unspecified, but
Minorca and South America were indicated as desirable ;
of the former she was to have the islands and ports
at Scheldt-mouth, Walcheren, Cadzant and Sluys.
Above all, Louis was to pay, pay, pay, and Charles
was to keep Parliament in the dark. How far Charles
was sincere in the direction of Popery, it is very
difficult to say ; the Catholics seem to have put
some confidence in him up till 1674. To me it seems
as if he merely intended to blind Louis until Holland
should be humbled. Busy Ministers came and went,
bogus Treaties were shown to Buckingham and Shaftes-
bury. Arlington and Clifford, recent converts to Popery,
were in the secret. James was also known to be
a recent convert, although he did not as yet * openly
declare himself to be one ; he had lost his wife a year
before, and he was soon to marry the good and beautiful
Mary Beatrice of Modena. War was declared on Holland
in March, '72 ; ' Delenda est Carthago ' said Shaftesbury
— a phrase which he was not allowed to forget. Ten
thousand troops were raised and encamped at Yarmouth
under a French Commander, Schomberg, 2 ready to be
transported to the Scheldt if the Fleet should be victorious.
The French and English Fleets joined in the Channel,
some ninety sail, under James and the Earl of Sandwich.
1 Not till 1676.
2 Schomberg was of German and English extraction, but he
was in the French service at this time. He became a Marshal
of France in 1675.
VOL. Ill 3
34 SECOND DUTCH WAR
They met the Dutch off Southwold on June ist, and
a fierce drawn battle was the result, the French ships
giving little assistance. It was the same story next
year, when Rupert and the Frenchman d'Estrees again
met de Ruyter off the Dutch coast ; the French Fleet,
for reasons of its own, hung back and all the brunt fell on
Rupert ; no losses of ships were sustained by either side,
but the English Fleet was the more damaged, and de
Ruyter's object, to avert an invasion, was attained.
Louis' Army had meanwhile overrun the Southern territory
of the Republic, and the Republic had had to save itself
by calling young William of Orange to the head of its
forces and government. William turned on at Arnheim
the tap which controlled the waters of Yssel and Rhine,
and put his country under two feet of water. The French
Army had to retreat.
Public opinion in England veered right round during
this war ; the Navy had borne the strain gallantly on
the water, but very badly in its administrative depart-
ments ; want of money was at the root of all. Louis
was thought to be leading us by the nose ; in reality
Charles had got him to do on land the work which we
were too weak to complete by sea. Holland hence-
forth gradually ceased to be a first-class Power, and,
though her commerce continued to increase far into the
Eighteenth Century, England was soon able to compete
successfully with that commerce in every quarter of the
globe save one. 1 Parliament, when it met in the autumn
of 1673 and again at the beginning of 1674, cried out
for peace, and the Peace of 1674 recognized the status
quo, all to the advantage of England. The object of young
Prince William was henceforth to draw nearer and
1 To wit the Spice Islands ; vide infra, vol. iv. p. 117.
THE TEST ACT, 1673 35
nearer to the English alliance, and in 1677 he succeeded
in marrying his cousin, Mary Stuart, elder daughter of
Prince James and Anne Hyde.
As a step towards carrying out the most secret article
of the Treaty of Dover, Charles had issued, in the same
month in which he declared war on Holland, a Declara-
tion of Indulgence, suspending all manner of penal laws
against Dissenters from the English Church, Protestant
and Catholic alike. The sturdy Protestants, who, more-
over, had better hopes from a Bill which had already
been introduced into the Lower House in 1668, did not
rise to this fly ; any toleration for themselves if accom-
panied by one for Papists, was to them a source of fear,
and this shows that they can't have been very badly
persecuted. Shaftesbury as Chancellor warmly sup-
ported the Declaration, but Parliament, when it met in
February, '73, utterly protested against anything of the
kind. The King withdrew the thing in the most sub-
missive manner, and it was a serious defeat for the
Monarchy. Parliament went further, and passed, without
a moment's hesitation, the first ' Test Act,' making the
reception of the Sacrament according to the Prayer Book
rite, and a strong declaration against the Catholic doctrine,
an absolute necessity for all persons holding office under
the Crown. James had to resign the Admiralty — a great
loss to the Navy, for which he had done much — and
Clifford the Treasurership. 1 Sir Thomas Osborne became
Treasurer and was made Earl of Danby. Shaftesbury
went into opposition and began to build up the party
soon to be openly called the ' Whigs.'
That party rested its claims on the maintenance of
the tradition of Eliot and Hampden — a son of the latter
1 He had been made Lord Treasurer in April, 1672.
36 ORIGIN OF WHIG PARTY
was one of its foremost members. Its favourite toast
in after years was, ' The Cause for which Hampden bled
on the field and Sidney * perished on the scaffold ! ' The
continuity of the said Cause cannot altogether be denied ;
Eliot and Hampden were in some measure the political
ancestors of Shaftesbury and Sidney ; however much
they had desired a united Nation, they had merely
succeeded in dividing it. But they had, at least, been
clean from personal motives ; they had never clamoured
for the spoils of office. In the early years of the Parlia-
ment of 1661, too, there was a knot of men verging
towards Whiggish actions, if not towards Whiggish
principles ; Lord Robartes in the Upper and Sir William
Coventry in the Lower House are examples, and this
' Country Party,' as it was then generally called, had
recruited itself from many discontented old Cavaliers
and courtiers ; it had, indeed, achieved a signal victory
over Charles in 1673, but that was because of the shadow
of Popery on the wall, which instantly rallied a majority
against the Crown. Shaftesbury's motives, however, I
take to have been ambitious and factious — the triumph
of his party by any and every means. That there were
good Whigs, who followed him in ignorance of this, I
do not for a moment deny, still less do I deny that
the Whig party, when settled in the saddle, became
more respectable and occasionally governed England well.
But they, even more than the Tories who opposed
them, were born in faction and were never able to free
themselves from their birth-stain.
Shaftesbury is an extraordinarily interesting figure —
a ' breathing corpse ' if you looked at his person,
suffering from a constant running sore, — a man of deep
1 Algernon Sidney, executed 1683.
SHAFTESBURY'S STRENGTH 37
reading, classical, historical, philosophical and theo-
logical, the friend of the great philosopher John Locke,
a Royalist in the Civil War, a trusted administrator of
the Protector, an intimate friend of Charles II. for the
first twelve years of his reign, tolerant in advance of
his age, perhaps because of his latitudinarian principles ;
the first man who, from the House of Lords, swayed
at once a majority in the House of Commons and in the
City of London, and who waged, almost successfully,
for seven years, a contest against one of the wariest
and most unscrupulous Kings who ever sat on a throne.
His first allies were perhaps the Duke of Buckingham
and Lord Wharton ; soon there gathered round him
the Earls of Essex, of Carlisle (a Howard), and Salisbury
(a Cecil) ; Lord Falconbridge, Cromwell's son-in-law ;
good old Holies, 1 William Lord Russell, Lord Grey of
Wark and Lord Howard of Escrick ; the last two were
men of disreputable character who betrayed their own
side after its defeat. George Savile, Viscount and
subsequently Marquis of Halifax, of whom anon, was
prepared to go a long way with this party, but not the
whole way. It is Shaftesbury, then, who is the first
true party leader, prepared to go the whole way, to do
anything in order to catch votes, and it must be
admitted that he used very dirty tools. He was not,
as later Whigs professed to be, the champion of
Holland, or of Flanders, or of liberty abroad ; foreign
politics, the naval strength and honour of England,
are merely cards in his hand. It is noticeable that,
while the party soon came to command an immense
majority in the Commons, it had, in that House, only
one man of note — William, Lord Russell ; its most
1 The last surviving leader of Eliot's party of 1629.
38 DANBY, LORD TREASURER
famous Commoner, Algernon Sidney, could never get
a seat in Parliament. In the Lords, before 1689, it
never had a majority at all ; it relied, therefore, mainly
on the rank and file of the Lower House — many of
whom had been enthusiastic Royalists in 1661. It
speaks, therefore, volumes either for the suspicion en-
gendered by Charles' want of system in government, or
for the abilities of Shaftesbury, that these men, mainly
rich country squires and merchants, were content to
follow the latter as they did in his campaign against
the Crown.
Somewhere about the year 1674-5 King Charles
began to give his mind to home politics more seriously
than before. He was well served by Secretary Coventry
and other administrators, and the wealth and credit of
the country were growing steadily in spite of the im-
morality of the Court and the factiousness of the Parlia-
ment. He got in Danby a Treasurer of conspicuous
ability, whose views on home politics were those of
Clarendon, and who, in foreign matters, favoured and
made an alliance with Holland — just the thing, one
would have thought, to appeal to the Parliament which
had denounced the alliance with France. Danby, who
had no scruples, no friends ' except his own impu-
dence,' and none too much money at his disposal, at-
tempted to build up a counter-party in the Commons
by direct bribery of honourable members, and was no
doubt the first Minister of the Crown to bribe on any
serious scale. He played his game well, but Charles
was playing a deeper game still, and never gave him
a free hand. Charles was still negotiating with Louis
for supplies, and was holding over Louis' head the
threat of a close alliance with Holland, Spain and the
VIOLENCE OF WHIGS 39
Emperor, against whom Louis continued to fight until
the Peace of Nimeguen in August, '78. Against these
negotiations Danby protested in vain. The real object
of the King was to keep . England neutral in this war,
and to be paid for doing so. With this view he agreed,
in the autumn of 'yy, to the marriage of his niece Mary
of York with her cousin William of Orange, and even
gave the bride away ; with the same view he promised
to Louis, from time to time during the decade '70-'8o,
successive prorogations and dissolutions of Parliament,
and winked at that monarch's aggressions on the
Southern borders of Flanders, which a more patriotic
King would have instantly opposed.
Parliament, indeed, sat little during Danby 's tenure
of office ; there was a prorogation of over a year,
March, '74, to April, '75. It is to be noticed that these
prorogations were made easy to the King by fierce
quarrels between the Houses, whenever they met, mainly
on points of ' privilege.' Danby was allowed in the
latter month to bring in a Test Bill to exclude from
both Houses of Parliament both Catholic and Protestant
Dissenters, but Shaftesbury led a fierce opposition against
him, and gave thereby the first proof of his power :
he intrigued with old republican exiles in Holland ; he
founded the ' Green Ribbon Club,' nominally for the
purpose of burning the Pope in effigy, really as a centre,
in which the parliamentary and non-parliamentary
opposition to Charles could meet and lay plans of agita-
tion. There was a very brief Session in '76, followed by
a fifteen months' prorogation, and, at the next meeting,
in February, '77, Shaftesbury began to raise the cry for
a new Parliament ; he and his friends maintained that
a prorogation for over a year should, ipso facto, cause
4 o ATTITUDE OF LOUIS XIV.
a dissolution. This time his effort was in vain.
Together with three other Peers he was sent to the
Tower by the Lords themselves ; he remained there
for over a year, and had to make an abject submission
in order to be let out. Charles and Danby appeared in
'jj to be completely triumphant over the first effort of
the Whigs ; the King professed zeal for the Dutch cause
and even got a considerable grant of money from Parlia-
ment, with which he equipped his Fleet ; he also recalled
and disbanded the few remaining British troops which
were still in the French service. 1
Louis began to be very uneasy ; he had no wish to
see Charles united with the English people in the Dutch
interest, and he therefore began to bribe himself a
party in the English Parliament. The King of Spain
and the Emperor, with far emptier pockets, were trying
to do the same. Louis' main agent was a fat little
Ambassador called Barillon, who resided for a long period
in England, r and made himself agreeable in society in spite
of his dirty habit of paring his nails in public. Barillon
has left on record that it became increasingly difficult
to fathom the aims of the King of England. But his
bribes were not without success ; the Whig leaders
promised to refuse Charles money for a French war.
Shaftesbury (a very rich man), Russell and Holies would
not take bribes, and, by 1680, Holies had turned his
honest back on the party that rested on them ; but the
others, including the ' lofty republican patriot ' Algernon
Sidney, took their thousand guineas with great com-
1 One regiment, ' The Buffs,' had returned from France at
the date of the First Dutch War. Another, ' The Royal Scots,'
originally in the Swedish service, had been in France from 1668-
70. Neither of these was disbanded.
THE POPISH "PLOT," 1678 41
placency, and the result was that Charles was not able
to pose as an armed mediator at the Peace of Nimeguen,
August, 1678. Three months before that he had to
apply to Louis again for cash, and Danby was made to
write a letter demanding it — a letter which nearly cost
the writer his head.
This Peace in fact marked the height of Louis' power
in Europe, but it was concluded at the expense of Spain
and the Empire, rather than of England or Holland.
Charles, then, had reason to be fairly satisfied, for he had
certainly never desired to go to war against France, and
only pretended to desire it as a move in the game against
the Whigs. But the Whigs had discredited themselves
also, for they had clamoured for war with France, and
yet had refused the King the men and the money to wage
it with ! Suddenly a new weapon fell into their hands.
The Reverend (?) Titus Oates, son of an ex-chaplain of
Pride's, himself once a Jesuit in Spain and Belgium,
already in his youth twice indicted for perjury, returned
to London from St. Omers in the summer of '78. With
the aid of a London clergyman named Tonge, whom he
gulled, Oates sought out a zealous London magistrate
called Godfrey, and deposited with him a certain paper ; it
was a copy of a story which, in August 'y8, he, Oates,
found means to tell to the King. The tale was that the
Jesuits had a plot on foot to kill Charles, and, if brother
James refused to become their instrument in a wholesale
massacre and revolution which was to follow, to kill
brother James as well.
Now there is no doubt that the Catholics were deeply
disgusted with Charles, for he owed them much, and
had failed to protect them ; after the defeat of his
Declaration of Indulgence he hardly seemed to try to
42 THE POPISH "PLOT"
do so, and he had accepted the Test Act without a
struggle. At the same time the lay Catholics and secular
priests were loyal to the core, and it was their great
misfortune, as it was that of their faith all over Europe,
that the Jesuits would not let them rest in this loyalty.
The most active English Jesuit was the Duchess of York's
secretary, Edward Coleman. Louis had used him as a
bribery agent, and he kept up a constant correspondence
with French and Roman Jesuits. That correspondence
unquestionably reveals a ' design ' of some sort. That
correspondence, or at least the fact of it, was vaguely
known to Oates ; he had probably heard of it from
Belgian Jesuits. Warnings of something of the kind,
from loyal Catholics, had reached the King before the
pretended revelation of Oates. That some movement
of ' force unlawfully directed against authority ' in the
interest of the Jesuits was contemplated, is certain.
What is not certain is how much James knew ; the case
as put by the latest authority (Mr. John Pollock, ' The
Popish Plot,' 1903) certainly looks black against him.
Oates at any rate began, at the end of September, to
accuse by name enormous numbers of people (leading
Catholic Peers among them) of a design to kill the King.
He was examined in Council, and the King pronounced
him " a most lying knave " ; but, when Coleman's house
was searched, incriminating papers were found, and the
whole town was thrown into a violent ' No Popery '
fervour. Numerous Jesuits and other Catholics were
arrested on the bare word of Oates. The terror and
suspicion were increased when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey,
the magistrate who had received Oates' deposition, was
found mysteriously dead in the outskirts of London
on October 17th. His death is one of the favourite
THE POPISH "PLOT" 43
1 mysteries ' of History, but the most reasonable con-
jecture seems to be that Oates had deposited with
Godfrey papers implicating the leading Jesuits to an
extent which he was afterwards unable to prove, but
which they knew to be near the truth, and that to get
possession of these papers they murdered Godfrey. It
also looks as if Godfrey, who was a friend of Coleman,
had given him some sort of warning, and even as if
Godfrey had anticipated his own fate.
In the month of Godfrey's murder, October '78, Parlia-
ment met, and Shaftesbury at once reorganized his party
on the basis of the ' Popish Plot ' : the Houses ordered
Committees of Investigation, sent five Catholic Peers to
the Tower, demanded the dismissal of all Papists from
London, and passed a Bill for ever excluding them from
both Houses. Oates became their hero, their idol, and,
as he found people believed anything he said, he naturally
went on to invent fresh and fresh lies. He soon found
imitators, Bedloe, Dangerfield, Prance, etc. ; he was
lodged at Whitehall, and no one dared to contradict
him. The King had simply to stand by and bide his
time. Shaftesbury more than hinted that ' Somerset
House ' (the Queen's residence) knew all about the Plot.
Parliament fell upon Danby, excellent Protestant though
he was known to be, as an easy victim, and impeached
him for the late secret letter to France, which the
English Ambassador at Paris had revealed out of personal
spite. At the same time it demanded the dismissal of
James from the Privy Council, and even suggested his
exclusion from the succession.
The King was in a very tight place ; he certainly had
no cause to love or trust brother James, but he didn't at
first believe any of Oates' tales. As for Danby, Charles
44 FACTIOUSNESS OF WHIGS
had already thrown Clarendon to the wolves, and been
none the worse for it ; yet to save Danby he dissolved
in January, '79, his eighteen-year-old Parliament, and
called a new one to meet in March. The Green Ribbon
Club at once began a fierce election campaign, in which,
it is said, freeholds were for the first time actually created
in the counties in order to multiply votes. The ' Ex-
clusion of the Popish Successor ' and ' Vengeance for the
Popish Plot ' were the leading cries. The result was an
overpowering Whig majority in the Lower House. Those
who, in our own days, cry out for a ' Single Chamber '
and denounce the hereditary legislators, might well take
a look at those fateful years 1679-81. The vengeance
that the Commons now demanded against whole cate-
gories of innocent persons was as blind, as ignorant and as
bloody as anything in the history of the French Revolu-
tion. Luckily the House of Lords, though sharing much
of this fanaticism, kept some measure of common sense.
Parliament, however, had to deal with a King of the
deepest craft, now thoroughly roused to play the game to
the end for its own sake — one might almost say for the
mere sport. Charles could at any moment have bought
peace, overwhelming popularity and a rich supply of
money, if he had wholly given way to the Whigs. He has
been compared to an angler who has hooked a big salmon
(he was fond of swearing by ' God's fish ') which he plays
with consummate skill : as long as the fish is in rough
water, going down stream at a fearful pace, and the banks
are steep and rocky, he simply has to give it line and hold
on ; it dashes over the last cataract, and thinks to break
him and get to sea ; but he has still some line left, and,
to the astonishment of the fish, it finds itself in a long,
deep, smooth pool. Its last floppings are not dignified,
SKILL OF HALIFAX 45
and the angler with a smile reels in and gets his gaff
home.
The King's first move was to take a Ministry partly
selected from the Opposition. He made Shaftesbury,
almost against his will, President of the Council, Essex a
Commissioner of the Treasury, Russell, Sir William Temple
and Halifax Privy Councillors, and Lord Sunderland,
a young man of whom we shall hear again, Secretary of
State. He professed that he would be guided always by a
Privy Council of thirty members, half at least of whom
should always be members of the Houses. The scheme
is attributed to Temple ; more probably it was Sunder-
land's. It was in some measure a ' new Constitution,'
a feeling towards the system of Cabinet government.
The most important inclusion was that of Halifax.
This remarkable man, George Savile, was a grandson of
Strafford's sister ; his father had been the intimate
friend of Selden, and had suffered loyally for Charles I.
The son had been made a peer in '68. He had drifted
over to Shaftesbury's side, partly in admiration of the
latter's talents, partly because he largely agreed with his
opinions. Both were latitudinarians, both professed
toleration, but Halifax really believed in it, as he also
believed in compromise. His learning and wit were
as great as Shaftesbury's, his patriotism far more true.
Charles had hitherto disliked, or perhaps really feared
him ; now he at once found in him his right hand. Not
that Halifax, if he had ever been a Whig, deserted the
Whigs — he was inclined to go great lengths in Whiggery ;
we shall see presently what he was not prepared to do.
The Whigs in fact put themselves in the wrong by
accepting office. Charles sent James out of the kingdom
— to Brussels, and then to Scotland : this did not satisfy
46 THE EXCLUSION BILL, 1679
them, and the King had no intention that this or any-
thing else should satisfy them. They prepared the
impeachment of the five Popish Lords ; he professed to
approve : they took up Danby's impeachment again ;
Charles cheerfully let him go to the Tower. They
proposed to the King to divorce the Queen, whom Oates
had already accused of high treason ; Charles, while
carefully protecting Katharine against Oates, allowed
their leaders to think he would consider the matter of
divorce. He even consented to the passing of a Habeas
Corpus Act, which turned the old Common Law right
into a Statutory right, and practically made it im-
possible to keep suspected persons in prison without
bringing them to trial. Then in May a Bill was intro-
duced and carried in the Lower House to exclude James
from the succession. Charles at once prorogued, and
soon afterwards dissolved Parliament.
By giving way as far as he had done, the King had
induced Shaftesbury to think he would swallow any-
thing. He had a natural son, James Crofts, whom he
had made Duke of Monmouth, a handsome, vain, empty-
headed lad, who gave himself away to the Whigs, and
who now allowed Shaftesbury to * run ' him as candidate
for the succession. A better candidate would have been
the Prince of Orange at once, or rather the Prince's wife,
Mary of York ; and to this it is possible that Halifax,
whose foresight taught him to believe in William, might
have agreed. But from an avowed bastard his whole
mind recoiled ; and Shaftesbury spoilt his cause by
getting up a rumour, to which Charles gave most solemn
denial, that the King had really been married to Mon-
mouth's mother, a woman of low character. This insult
and the firm support of Halifax gave the King courage
WHIGS AND TORIES 47
to dismiss Shaftesbury and his followers from the new
Privy Council, October, '79. Laurence Hyde, the second
son of Clarendon, became First Lord of the Treasury,
and Sidney Godolphin came to share with Sunderland
the duties of Secretary of State.
Meanwhile, from the autumn of '78, the trials of
1 Jesuits and other wicked persons/ accused of being in
the Plot, had been going on and went on into 1681.
Altogether over thirty persons were condemned to death,
mostly on the false evidence of men like Oates and
Bedloe. Their lives were sacrificed to the aggressive
policy of Shaftesbury and the defensive policy of the
King. Strangely enough, whatever truth lay at the
bottom of the matter, neither Shaftesbury, who directed
the storm, nor the judges, who tried the cases, knew.
If the King knew, it is probable that Halifax knew also ;
but we have no means of knowing what the King knew,
and, till we can say that he knew something definite,
we must brand him and Halifax too with the crime of
going with the stream, and sacrificing lives which they
believed to be innocent. The issue was now clear.
Charles ' would rather see his son hanged than legitimize
him.' Monmouth, who had been allowed to put down
a rebellion of the Scottish Covenanters in the summer,
was banished to the Hague, where William doubtless
learned to know him for the empty ass he was. All the
latter part of '79 and for the first half of '8o constant
petitions for an early meeting of Parliament poured in
upon the King, together with petitions of loyalty pro-
fessing ' abhorrence ' of the Whigs' movements ; from
this circumstance arose the names of ' Petitioners ' and
* Abhorrers,' soon to be merged in those of ' Whigs '
and ' Tories/ Shaftesbury got up, among other things,
48 RESULTS OF THE ''PLOT"
pretended plots against his own life, or perhaps there
may have been some grains of truth in these also ;
certainly the Jesuits, whose backs were now to the
wall, would not stick at a little assassination. The
temper of the City was well shown on ' Queen
Elizabeth's Day ' (November 17th), 1679, when, in the
presence of a hundred thousand spectators, there was
a great procession from Whitehall to Temple Bar, in
which the Pope and the Devil, ' attended by boys in
surplices, with a train of bishops, cardinals and friars/
were carried past the poor Queen's windows and the
Pope was burned at Temple Bar ; the Lord Mayor had
told the King it would be impossible to stop this show
and dangerous to attempt it. But the tide was now be-
ginning to turn, though the Whig fish was still tearing
unconsciously down -stream to meet it. The evidence
given by Oates on the trial of Sir George Wakeman, the
Queen's physician, had been gravely shaken. Wakeman
had been acquitted, and Scroggs, C.J., had said some
very hard things to Oates ; and when, at the end of
1680, Lord Stafford, the oldest and most venerable of
the five Catholic Peers impeached for the plot, was at
last brought to trial before the House of Lords, there
was good reason to expect an acquittal. To the Kings'
great surprise and disgust he was found guilty. New
witnesses had arisen, whose credit his feeble and rambling
defence failed to shake. The King dared not pardon
him, for, if he was to triumph in the end, he must not
appear to be ' defeating the ends of justice.' Moreover
it was on the Lords that the King relied most, and it
was a majority of twenty- two Lords who had condemned
Stafford. But the end was not far off.
Six months earlier Shaftesbury had indicted James as
DANGER OF CIVIL WAR 49
a Popish recusant, though the Judges had managed to
prevent the Grand Jury from giving its verdict. The
new Parliament met in October, '80, and Charles offered
expedient after expedient to neutralize the dangers
expected from a Popish successor ; offered, in fact, any-
thing short of Exclusion. But the Commons were
1 outside themselves,' and passed the Exclusion Bill at
once. The Lords, mainly owing to the brilliant reasoning
of Halifax, threw out the Bill by a majority of two to
one. Thereon the Commons, not content with refusing
supply, voted that any one who helped the King with
money was an enemy to the kingdom ; civil war was in
fact freely suggested in the Whigs' camp. In January,
'8i, Charles suddenly dissolved Parliament and called
a new one to meet at Oxford on March 21st. He had
assured himself, by a good supply of money from
France, of being able to hold on for the next three
years. Sunderland, who had advised his master to
give way to the Whigs and recognize Monmouth as his
heir, was dismissed, and not reinstated until '83.
Shaftesbury ' went to the country ' with the old cries
of 1679, yet more shrill : ' The Bill, the whole Bill, and
nothing but the Bill of Exclusion ! ' ' No " Arbitrary "
Dissolution of Parliament ! ' ' No Standing Army ! '
and Monmouth (James Crofts) for heir of Great Britain
and Ireland ! The said Crofts returned from exile, and
went about allowing Green Ribbonites to worship him.
The Whig Peers rode to Oxford in arms and accom-
panied by armed retainers ; the King for his part took
a troop of Lifeguards with him. Both retainers and
Lifeguards, it was thought, would be needed. Oddly
enough the future George I., then ' courting the Lady
Anne,' paid a visit to Oxford about the same time : he
vol. in 4
50 OXFORD IN 1681
did not reveal his thoughts on the points at issue between
cousin Charles and his subjects ; George was not given
to revealing his thoughts, and the lady Anne ultimately
married another George, Prince of Denmark, in his
stead. The undergraduates were sent down, which
must have been a great disappointment to them, before
the King arrived on March 14th. On his way to Christ
Church, where he lodged, gownsmen 1 crowded round
his carriage crying out, ' The Devil hang up the Round-
heads/ whereat His Majesty smiled and seemed pleased.
Carfax blazed with bonfires, but without Rumps (which
Antony Wood thought a pity). On the 17th the King
went to Bur ford races. The Queen, who only felt safe
when she was near her husband, lodged at Merton.
Shaftesbury, who had tried to get his friend Locke to hire
a whole College for him, was obliged to put up with about
half of Balliol ; his servants no doubt would go across
and drink at that ' horrid, dingy, scandalous alehouse,
where the Balliol men, by continual bubbing, do add art
to their natural stupidity.' These, by the way, told their
Master, ' who spoke to them of the mischiefs of that
hellish liquor called ale,' that the Vice-Chancellor's men(i.e.
Trinity men) do the same thing at The Split Crow. The
Vice-Chancellor seems to have defended the practice : —
" There is no hurt," says he, "in ale." Mr. Prideaux,
who tells of this scandal, was a Christ Church man, but
he was afterwards obliged to own that the students of
' the House ' ' owed £1,500 in ticks at The Mermaid.'
Oxford tradesmen, in spite of a regular tariff posted
up by the Vice-Chancellor, were evidently charging
' Commemoration prices,' for even that pestilent Whig
1 Presumably Dons, who were then bolder in expressing sound
opinions than they are to-day.
THE OXFORD PARLIAMENT 51
Alderman William Wright, M.P., at whose house
Monmouth lodged, was not above asking Shaftesbury
twenty shillings a bushel for oats, 1 and declaring it was
cost price ! The Lords sat in the Geometry School on
the first floor of the ' Schools,' and the Commons in the
Convocation House itself ; this was, however found
inconveniently small. The King on the 21st, in a crafty
speech, made his last offer, well knowing that it would
be refused ; James, he said, should be banished the
kingdom and Mary of Orange act as Regent for him ;
any son James had should be educated as a Protestant
— only let the title of King remain to its lawful owner ;
to the elevation of Monmouth he, Charles, would never
consent. But not a word of this would Shaftesbury's
party hear. Exclusion and Exclusion alone would
satisfy them. For six days 2 the Commons were perfectly
confident. Charles pretended to be preparing the Shel-
donian Theatre for their better accommodation. But
on the 28th he suddenly appeared in his robes in the
Lords, sent for the Commons, and said, " My Lords and
Gentlemen, that all the world may see to what a point
we are come," etc., and dissolved his last Parliament.
He had gauged the turn of the tide with perfect accuracy ;
the Whig fish had altogether mistaken it, and had spent
1 The ways of Oxford tradesmen were no doubt always
inscrutable, but I am bound to add that the price quoted sounds
incredible. It is, however, given by Mr. Christie, usually a very
accurate writer, in his ' Life of Shaftesbury/ vol. ii., p. 396.
Lord Shaftesbury's papers are now, in excellent order, at the
Record Office, but I searched them in vain for this letter, which
was written by John Locke on February 6th ; nor is anything
known of the letter at St. Giles House, Cranborne, the seat of
the present Lord Shaftesbury.
2 March 27th was a Sunday.
52 CHARLES SAVES THE CROWN
its furious strength in vain ; the angler's iron wrist had
but to reel in, and his triumph was complete.
The strength of the reaction must not, however, be
overstated. ' The country,' i.e. the intelligent upper
classes, felt that anything was better than civil war, the
dreadful period of which every one of middle age could
remember. The Whigs were preparing for civil war,
simply to set a bastard on the throne of Great Britain.
The alternative was a Papist, and we hated it ; but
it couldn't be helped. We would do our best to be loyal
to him ; and when he became King we tried very hard
to be so. The humour of the situation is reached when
we learn from Bishop Burnet that, on William's next
visit to Charles, in July of that same year, the King
prophesied to his nephew exactly what James would
do when he became King ; and many people have
therefore not unnaturally said, ' Would not Charles
have been wiser to agree with his Parliament ? ' The
answer must be a thousand times, No. In the first place
this acute if unscrupulous man saw that his Parliament
did not represent any enduring wish of the sober part
of the English people ; the Whig majority was a ' scratch '
majority, based on a temporary terror, fanned by the story
of the Plot. In the second place, the Crown would have
been for ever degraded by being placed on the head of
the son of Lucy Walters. Charles saved the Majesty of
the Crown, whatever that was worth — and it is worth very
much — and handed it on with a lustre that the Revolution
of 1688 could not impair, that even the four Georges
could scarcely dim. But for the wicked King Charles
there would have never been a good Queen Victoria.
^Shaftesbury was now reduced to planning either open
or secret risings, which every hour made more and more
ARREST OF SHAFTESBURY 53
certain to fail. Plots there could be, and even assassina-
tion plots ; the Whiggery of the City of London had been
very violent and would die very hard. Halifax suggested
Shaftesbury's immediate arrest, and he was arrested in
July and sent to the Tower under a charge of high treason.
Just before he was brought to trial in November, Dryden
set the world ringing with his great satire of ' Absalom
and Achitophel ' (Monmouth and Shaftesbury ; see
II. Sam. xv-xviii). But, at the trial, Whig Sheriffs of
course impanelled a Whig Grand Jury, and ' no true
bill ' was found. Shaftesbury, however, on his release,
failed in an attempt to prosecute for perjury the wit-
nesses who had appeared against him. All 1682 the
reaction grew, and all the attempts of the Whig leaders
to raise forces were in vain. These leaders were now
reduced to Essex, Monmouth, Lord Grey of Wark,
William Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney and Shaftesbury
himself. Towards the end of the year the last was
obliged to go into hiding in the East end of London, and,
when Monmouth was arrested, he lost heart and fled
in disguise to Holland. That hospitable country was
already full of exiles of his party, but an Amsterdam
burgher must be excused if he greeted Shaftesbury with
the quip, " Carthago nondum est deleta." In a few weeks,
January, '83, the great Whig leader was dead. Assassina-
tion plots remained the last card of his defeated followers,
and for two of these, brought to light in 1683, Russell and
Sidney suffered death. It is probable that Russell at
least was innocent of any intention to kill ; he was,
however, actively plotting insurrection, and so has become
a Whig martyr. In both cases the law of treason was
severely strained by the Judges, especially in the case of
Sidney, when an unpublished republican manuscript
54 THE RYE HOUSE PLOT
was allowed to count as evidence against the prisoner.
The more famous of the two designs, called the ' Rye
House Plot,' to kill Charles and James at a lonely post-
house near Hoddesdon on their way home from New-
market, was organized by two men called Ferguson and
Rumbold ; the former, who had a perfect genius for plots
and for escaping from their consequences, became a
chaplain of Monmouth's in 1685, and died as a Jacobite
plotter ; the latter was an old ' agitator ' of 1649, and had
been on guard at Charles I.'s scaffold — he would have
been ' none the worse for a hanging ' at any time, and
ended with being hanged for Argyll's rising. Essex
saved himself from Russell's fate by committing suicide
in prison, Lord Howard of Escrick by turning King's
evidence, and Lord Grey by flight to Holland. Sidney's
had been an extraordinary career ; he was a Percy as
well as a Sidney ; he had fought at Marston Moor, had
been named, but had refused to sit as one of Charles I.'s
judges ; had denounced Oliver for turning out the Long
Parliament, had lived, now in high Catholic society at
Rome, now with exiled regicides in Switzerland, and had
vehemently supported the Dutch against his fatherland in
1665. Even Shaftesbury had always distrusted him, and
he had taken an enormous bribe from Barillon. But, as
he said, he was ' manus haec inimica tyrannis,' and, after
Shaftesbury's flight, he led Essex and Russell by the nose.
On the rebellious City of London also vengeance was
taken. On some trifling pretext its Charter was forfeited
and a new one granted, by which the Sheriffs and Alder-
men had to be approved by the Crown, and were given
a veto on the elections of the Common Council-men.
Thus a Royalist Corporation was ensured, Royalist juries
could now be impanelled, and Royalist members would
DEATH OF CHARLES II., 1685 55
probably be returned to Parliament. As for that body
itself, Charles omitted to summon it for the rest of his
reign — very nearly four years from the dissolution of the
Oxford Session ; Halifax, it is true, urged him to summon
it, but Halifax also interceded warmly for Russell's life.
Charles was no doubt hard up for cash, in spite of the
excellent management of his Treasurer, Laurence Hyde,
now Lord Rochester, but it was a condition to which
he was well used, and his alliances, both with France
and France's enemy William, seemed firmer than ever.
Whether even his adroitness could have continued to
maintain this position long must be doubtful. Charles
had frankly told William in 1681 that there might be
danger for the Netherlands, but that his own first duty
was to save the Crown of England. He had managed
to hold Louis back from an attack upon Luxemburg in
1681, but failed to do so in 1684. Monmouth had given
trouble in 1682 — he had been making quasi-royal pro-
gresses in the West, and had even ' touched ' persons for
the ' King's evil,' as the scrofula, healable only by royal
touch, was called ; he was therefore again banished in 1683.
The King died of an unknown l disease, which baffled the
medical science of that day, on February 6th, 1685 ; his
last act was to accept the sacraments from a Catholic priest
who had aided his escape from Worcester ; his last words
were to apologize, with cynical politeness, for ' having been
such an unconscionable time in dying.' Indeed he must
have been a man of extraordinary physical endurance to
bear for five days the tortures of bleeding and blistering
with hot bricks, which the doctors applied to relieve him.
1 Dr. Raymond Crawfurd has at length made a true diagnosis
of Charles' disease, and is about to publish a monograph on the
subject.
CHAPTER II
"JESUITS AND OTHER WICKED
PERSONS "
If one put James II. into a book of fiction, people would
say, " What an impossible character ! " Other men who
have thrown away crowns from sheer bigotry have had
some substratum of goodness, or some personal charm,
or it has been possible to weave some romance round
them. James was bad, unromantic and a fool.
King Solomon in his Proverbs distinguishes between
two kinds of fools ; there is one who should be answered
according to his folly, and one who should not. James
was equally incapable of profiting by either kind of
answer. Louis XIV. honestly told him to seek his
salvation in a close French alliance, to unwhig his people
for ever, and to chastise them with scorpions if they
resisted ; and, though much of this fell in with James'
particular brand of folly, he was too proud to take the
advice. The loyal English Tories, on the other hand,
told James that he must reign according to the old
Constitution, and protect the Church of England ;
Whiggery would then die a natural death. This advice
he rejected even more contemptuously ; and in forty-six
months he had rushed blindly on his fate. No king or
man ever more richly deserved that fate : the supremacy,
not the liberation of his own Church was what he meant
56
CHARACTER OF JAMES II. 57
to bring about ; and his own Church was not even that
of his own Catholic subjects, who only wanted peace
and quiet ; still less was it that of the Pope, who hated
and dreaded Louis XIV. ; but it was the Church of the
French Jesuits, who were scheming to set their feet on
the necks of Popes, Kings and peoples alike. James,
however, was an inapt pupil of the Jesuits, for he was
a singularly inadequate liar and an even worse judge
of men. The Catholics whom he gathered round him
were men without character, ability or position in
the country ; he would take to his bosom the most
ludicrous hypocrites if they pretended conversion ; he
would tell his most loyal Tories that he would no longer
employ them unless they would be converted : he was
fond of saying that his father had been ruined ' because
he had made concessions,' and that he, James, meant to
make none. But it was just because he was in other
respects a bad, cheap copy of his father, that he
died an exile ; of the private virtues, of the dignity and
courage of his father in misfortune, he had no share.
There was nothing altogether impossible, though much
that was inconvenient, in the position of a Catholic
Sovereign ruling over Protestant subjects ; there were
other instances of it in Europe. Except in Spain
Catholics now seldom actually burned Protestants ; even
James had made no serious attempts to convert his
two daughters. But England and all Europe saw how
Louis XIV. was persecuting French Protestants who
refused conversion, and it would therefore behove James
to walk very warily. At first he promised to do so ; he
was proclaimed King without a dog barking ; he told
his first Privy Council that ' no one should perceive his
private opinions,' and that he would protect Church and
58 LORD SUNDERLAND
State as by law established. Of bis first ' Cabinet,'
Rochester, Godolphin, Halifax and Sunderland, we
already know something. Rochester and his brother
Clarendon, Viceroy of Ireland, were the hope of the
' stern unbending Tories ' ; for right divine, non-resistance
and all the rest of it ; a harsh, unpopular but honest
pair. Godolphin was a good administrator, but had no
influence. Halifax, the ablest living Englishman, soon
found that he too had none, but as he did not scruple
to give the most unpalatable advice in the most courtly
language, he was soon dismissed. The man of the hour
was Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, Secretary of
State, son of a hero who had fallen by Falkland's side at
Newbury and of a lady who had been sung by poets as
' Saccharissa ' ; he was a strange product of such parents.
Dryden calls him
A second Machiavel, who soared above
The little ties of gratitude and love.
When he thought Shaftesbury would win he had been
quite ready to swallow the Exclusion Bill : he was now
all for vengeance on the defeated Whigs ; but, in case of
accident, he used his wicked wife's lover, Henry Sidney,
to convey treacherous intelligence to the Dutch Court.
Though he took a large annual pension from France, it
was he who prevented James from accepting the help
of France in the crisis of 1688. He turned Papist in
that year, and Protestant again after the Revolution.
But he had mental abilities and a grasp of politics only
inferior to those of Halifax.
King James also took much counsel of Sir George
Jeffreys, Chief Justice, whom he made Lord Chancellor
in the autumn of 1685. Jeffreys was an exaggerated
WILLIAM OF ORANGE 59
specimen of the acute but vulgar criminal lawyer, of
which there have been plenty since his time. Lords
Powis, Bellasys and Arundel were stupid and not dis-
honourable Catholics ; Lord Dover clever and dishonour-
able. Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnel, belongs to
Irish history. Edward Petre, the King's Jesuit Clerk
of the Closet and chief adviser, was detested by the
better Catholics, and distrusted by every one who knew
him : the King vainly tried to get the Pope to make
him a Cardinal or Archbishop of York ; but the Pope
very handsomely snubbed Lord Castlemaine, who was
sent to Rome on this errand. In fact the Pope would
have nothing to say to any of James' gang.
The moderate sentiments which James had at first
expressed lasted very few weeks. His attempts in favour
of Popery may be divided into two periods : in the first
he hoped to get the Church of England to consent to
them ; in the second he tried an alliance with the Pro-
testant Dissenters against that Church. That which
operated fatally against both attempts was the state of
Europe at the time. James was fifty- two years old, and
his heiress was Mary, Princess of Orange, a pious, brave,
tender-hearted Protestant lady, wholly submissive to
her husband. Her reign, therefore, would be the reign
of William the Dutchman, an invalid suffering badly
from asthma, a Calvinist, famous for his taciturnity and
unconciliatory manners ; ' the plainest man ever seen
and of no fashion at all,' Charles' courtiers had thought,
but one who concealed a soul of fire under a mask of ice.
The fuel that fed that fire was hatred of Louis XIV. To
build up European leagues against Louis, and to throw
the weight of the English Navy and purse into their scale
was the object of William's life; and, in order to do this
60 JAMES' PARLIAMENT
last, he was finally obliged to play in English politics
the part of a Whig. He never liked the part ; could his
wife have succeeded her father in the course of nature
and fairly soon, he might have led a united England
against Louis. By temperament William was autocratic ;
he had had his bellyful of Republican sentiments and
factious Whiggery at the Hague, and was still having
it. But circumstances and the folly of James left him
no choice. Louis to some extent smoothed his path, for
the aggressive policy of France brought about in 1686
the League of Augsburg between Spain, the Emperor
and some German States ; moreover, by revoking his
grandfather's ' Edict of Nantes,' Louis had flooded
Europe with industrious Protestant exiles burning for
revenge. In England enormous subscriptions were raised
for these people, much to the disgust of King James.
James called a Parliament in May, and it proved to be
a High Church Tory Assembly, the most loyal that any
Stuart King ever called. It voted him his brother's
revenue at once, and did not press for the execution of
anti-Catholic laws. While it was sitting the successful
crushing of two rebellions strengthened the throne a
good deal. The former of these, Argyll's, belongs to
Scottish history ; " the latter, that of the Duke of
Monmouth, was the last rebellion that had its roots in
English soil. Each started from Holland, and originated
in plots of Whig exiles there ; but to William, of course,
the success of either would have been fatal. Monmouth
landed in June near Lyme, Dorset, with only eighty-
three companions. But Somerset was an old ' Parlia-
mentary ' district, and the bastard Duke had made
many friends there in '82. He put forward an extremely
1 Vide infra, p. 241.
MONMOUTH'S REBELLION 61
Whiggish declaration, leaving the question of his
' rights ' to a free Parliament, but branding his uncle
James as a tyrant ; and his programme, equality of all
Protestants, annual Parliaments, etc., proved attractive
to the peasantry and the artisans of the small towns.
So when he reached Taunton, an old Whig stronghold,
he had gathered round him some five thousand ill-
armed men, and thereupon claimed the Crown ; many of
the Militia, who were called out against him, deserted
to his colours. But very few persons of substance
joined him, though he had hopes of help from Lord
Delamere in Cheshire. Parliament at once voted
£400,000 for the Army, and attainted the Duke of high
treason. Lords Feversham and Churchill led the regular
troops, including the recently recalled garrison of Tangier
under Colonel Kirke, into the West. The Pretender
was completely routed at Sedgemoor near Bridgwater,
though the Wessex peasants, armed with scythes,
fought most gallantly ; and Kirke, who was entrusted
with their final suppression, decorated Somerset with
gibbets. The autumn Assize which followed was known
(after the Revolution, when much legend rapidly grew
up) as the ' Bloody Assize,' * and Jeffreys, who presided
at it, incurred much obloquy. There were nearly four-
teen hundred prisoners to be tried for treason in Dorset,
Somerset and Devon ; sixty-five were executed at once,
and during the next few months perhaps as many again,
but the majority were allowed to ransom themselves, or
1 The first use I have found of the word is in an anonymous
Dutch book, ' by D. v. H./ now in the library of the Athenaeum
Club, published in 1690, called ' Englands Staatsveranderingen
vertoond in het Leven van Jacobus II.,' and evidently written
by some one who accompanied William's expedition to England.
62 THE CATHOLIC QUESTION
were transported to America. Jeffreys, who was accused
of taking bribes from the relations of some prisoners,
said, after his own fall, that the King had urged him
to much greater severity.
During the rebellion James, in defiance of the Test
Act, had employed some Catholics in his Army, and
Halifax, who remonstrated against this, had been dis-
missed. What would the loyal Houses of Parliament
say ? They reassembled in November, just after James
had outraged public feeling by prohibiting the celebra-
tion of ' the Fifth ' (' no bonfires or squibs allowed ').
James made a long speech to them, pointed out, with
some truth, how inefficient the Militia had proved, and
asked for a large increase of the regular Army. Then
with incredible folly he went on to stir gratuitously the
question of the employment of Catholics, which perhaps
might have been passed over in silence, and said he was
determined to keep them. This was too much for the
Commons, who, by the mouth of a typical Tory, Sir
Edward Seymour, ' that proud and saucy man,' protested
emphatically against anything of the kind. A vote of
£700,000 for the Army was carried, but James wantonly
threw this away in his anger at the protest, which in the
Lords, led by Halifax, Devonshire and Bishop Compton
of London, had been even more emphatic. On the
tenth day of its session Parliament was prorogued, and
James never summoned it again.
He now proceeded to give, wholesale, ' dispensations '
to Catholics to hold offices in spite of the Test Act, and,
after clearing out four Judges, got a judicial decision
to the effect that such ' dispensing power ' was legal.
Herbert, C.J., laid down that such power was an essential
part of the Royal Prerogative : and, in law as based on
THE ECCLESIASTICAL COMMISSION 63
precedent, Herbert was right ; he was no mere time-
server, for when he shortly afterwards refused to rule, as
James wished him to, that for a soldier to desert his
colours was a capital felony, he was speedily dismissed.
But the result of the legalizing of the dispensing power
was that precedent and principle were now brought
into more glaring opposition than under Charles I.
There was nothing to stop a Catholic King from filling
every office in the Protestant State — civil, military and
religious — with men of his own faith, and James promptly
began to do so. He seems to have forgotten that, if he
were successful, there would not in England be nearly
enough Catholics ' to go round.' That he offended
three-fourths of the Peerage by turning out of posts at
Court or Lord-Lieutenancies great men like the Dukes
of Somerset and Norfolk, troubled him not at all.
And the Church of England, which by its doctrine of
divine right had put him on the throne, seemed to him
an excellent corpus vile on which to experiment with
dispensations. Was he not Head of the said Church ?
In July, '86, he appointed an Ecclesiastical Commission
to exercise the disciplinary powers of the Headship for
him. Jeffreys and Sunderland were the leading spirits
on it ; Rochester was always outvoted and soon ceased
to attend it ; Archbishop Sancroft refused to sit on it ;
Bishops Spratt and Crewe did sit, but the former resigned
in '88. Its first job was to deal with Edward Compton,
Bishop of London, who had refused to suspend a parson
for preaching against Popery. Compton was a dangerous
man to offend — a sturdy, rather unspiritual person, of
noble birth, who had been in the Guards before he took
orders, and since had been tutor to Princesses Mary and
Anne. The Commission suspended him from his bishop-
64 MAGDALEN COLLEGE , OXFORD
ric. Then, in the Universty of Oxford, James thought
that three at least of the leading colleges might well be
Romanized ; so he gave dispensations to Catholics to
hold the Deanery of Christ Church and the Mastership
of University.
As you approached Oxford by the London road the
first object that then greeted your eyes was the lovely
tower of Magdalen College. ' That,' said a friend to
the Duke of Wellington in after years, ' was the wall
against which James II. ran his head ' ; and indeed
the King hurtled with unexampled violence against
those venerable stones. On a vacancy in the headship
in March, '8y, our Fellows (I speak as a Magdalen man)
refused to execute King James' mandate to elect a man
of bad character, reputed a Papist and statutably in-
eligible, and chose Mr. Hough instead. As a concession
to morality the King withdrew his bad friend, and
ordered the College to substitute for Hough Dr. Parker,
the Bishop of Oxford, who had strong leanings to Popery.
This was also refused. The case dragged on for nearly
a year, but ended in the deprivation by the Ecclesiastical
Commission of Hough, of twenty-five Fellows and of
numerous scholars. Good Lord Abingdon wrote to the
deprived Fellows, and told them that " he wished he
had preferments enough for all of 'em, but, as he hadn't,
they were welcome to beef and mutton at Rycot."
Papists were put in their places by the Crown. Parker
died in March, '88, and a Catholic bishop called Gifford
was immediately nominated President, but the under-
graduates treated him and the new Fellows ' with all
imaginable scorn.'
The same game went on elsewhere ; early in '8y the
Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge was deprived of his office
JAMES AND THE DISSENTERS 65
and of all his preferments, because the Senate had refused
to give a degree to a monk. A Jesuit school, with
tuition gratis, was opened at the Savoy ; a gorgeous
Catholic chapel was dedicated at Whitehall, a colony
of monks was established in St. James' Palace Chapel,
and a Papal Nuncio, who, for his part, approved of
none of these proceedings, was received in great state
at Court. There was even a dreadful rumour that
Dr. Busby of Westminster School, the greatest Head
Master that ever swished boy (1638-95), was to make
way for a Jesuit !
When he finally dismissed Rochester in January, '87,
James had parted with all hope of bending the English
Church, whose loyalty had given way to terror, and
whose terror was now driving it towards resistance.
It was now that the King turned to the Dissenters and
issued his first ' Declaration of Indulgence/ suspending
wholesale the Test Act and all other Acts and oaths
restrictive of religious freedom. This document has
the impertinence to take its stand upon * Natural Rights,'
of which the English law knows nothing at all. "I
am confident," James writes to his cousin 'Sophia
of Hanover, " that the much greater part of the
Nation is grateful to me for having given liberty
of conscience to all." Some Dissenting bodies, such
as the Baptists and the Quakers, under the influence
of William Penn, swallowed the bait ; but the sober
Presbyterians, immeasurably the largest Dissenting sect,
preferred ' persecution ' by the English Church to tolera-
tion in common with the Roman. From that hour a
successful revolt in some shape was merely a question
of time and opportunity.
There was indeed one real danger. In the summer of
vol. in 5
66 PARLIAMENT TO BE SWAMPED
'8j James dissolved his long-prorogued Parliament, and
began to prepare measures for getting a new one of a
Catholic and Dissenting complexion. He thought that he
could do this by jobbery ; so he appointed a Commission
to ' regulate ' the Municipal Corporations, whose charters
had already in many cases been regranted, on the
model of that of London, since the year 1681. This
Commission substituted aldermen and town councillors,
either of Papist or Dissenting views, for those who then
existed ; these, it was supposed, would elect subservient
members for boroughs. The county constituencies might
be ' managed ' by the nomination of Catholics or Dis-
senters as Lords-Lieutenant, Sheriffs and Justices of
the Peace ; and, if these people couldn't intimidate
the forty-shilling freeholder at the poll, they could at
least make false returns, or job him out of his vote in
some way. As for the Lords, the King could ' swamp '
them by nominating a hundred or so of his courtiers to
be Peers. But all this took time, and, hard as James
worked at it, and often as he said he was going to call
a Parliament, he always found that he was ' not quite
ready yet.'
And what of the future ? Suppose such a sham
Parliament called, and the Catholics and the wilder
sectaries in possession of all power ? Great is the name
of a Parliament, but would England still acquiesce, and
believe in that body ? William of Orange did not feel
sure about this ; but his English friends told him plainly
that, in that case, there would be no Protestant Succession
or Successor. William, of course, was in touch with all
parties in England, and was admirably served by his
agents, Dykvelt and Zulestein. There was the reckless
Tom Wharton, the Whig profligate and wit, who had
'IN TE SPES UNICA' 67
carried the Exclusion Bill up to the Lords, and who
was now writing a mad song called ' Lilliburlero,' set to
music by Purcell, which was to ' whistle King James
out of three kingdoms ' ; he was for striking at once.
Even the loyal Hyde brothers, even Danby, the champion
of Princess Mary, Churchill, the friend of Princess Anne,
Shrewsbury, the convert from Popery, Bedford and
Nottingham, heads respectively of moderate Whigs and
moderate Tories — all these could only tell William much
the same as Wharton, ' in te spes unica! . . . ' for the
Queen is with child again : true, all her children have
hitherto died in infancy ; but this one will live and it
will be a boy. The Jesuits will take care that it is a
boy. The King has been to St. Winifred's Holy Well
in Wales, and the Saint has assured him that it shall be
a boy.' And so the year '8y ran out, and every one
whistled ' Lilliburlero Bullen-a-la.'
William had given due heed to these warnings, and,
by the beginning of '88, was preparing to do something
serious, though it was not till July that James got a
glimmering idea that ' some in Holland have a mind to
a war.' Louis pressed upon James an open French
alliance and an attack on Holland ; James turned a
deaf ear to all but Father Petre, Sunderland and
St. Winifred. But he asked the Dutch Estates to send
back the six British regiments that had been in Holland
since 1678, and, when the Estates refused, he began
some fortifications at Sheerness and Chatham. William's
initial difficulties, however, were, like those of his name-
sake in 1066, enormous : as Admiral and Captain-General
of the Dutch Army and Navy he could not put those
forces on a war footing without the consent of the Es-
tates ; and the Estates, besides being jealous of William,
68 THE SEVEN BISHOPS
could point out that there was no offensive alliance of
England and France, and so no casus belli. William
was obliged, therefore, both to stretch his legal powers
and to begin his equipment largely from his private
resources. Before midsummer he had accomplished
very little, and meanwhile in England events had
marched fast.
Princess Anne in London was in terror early in the
year ; her letters to Sister Mary curse Sunderland for
a knave who is pushing on the King to more Popery :
..." Don't come here and don't let William come,
even if father invites him. ... I fear something might
happen to you . . . burn this letter at once." April
brought a second Declaration of Indulgence, and an
order to all parsons to read it from their pulpits on
two successive Sundays. This was the crux for the
English churchmen, and had been intended by the
King to be so. He who refused to read would incur
the guilt of resistance to the Lord's Anointed ; he who
read would betray his faith. The Bishops, supported
by the Hydes and other Tory Peers, held anxious con-
ference at Lambeth, and, on May 18th, seven of them —
Sancroft, White, Ken, Lloyd, Trelawney, Lake and
Turner — presented to the King a most respectful petition
against the order to read the Declaration. James told
them their petition was ' a Standard of rebellion ' ;
they little knew that he was speaking the truth. It
was intended to be kept private, but it was published
the same day, and its words ran through England like
an electric spark. The Church, never really popular
before, became the idol of Whig London, whose Cor-
poration had just been tampered with to suit James'
design for a sham Parliament. The King madly deter-
BIRTH OF THE PRINCE OF WALES, 1688 69
mined to prosecute the Seven Bishops for a ' seditious
libel,' and meanwhile sent them to the Tower ; all the
City poured out on to the River, or knelt in the mud
at the edge, to beg their blessing as they went thither.
James thought he was sure of his Judges, and did his
best to pack a jury. But, when the trial came off on
June 29th, his Judges deserted him, his counsel was
hissed in court, and, though one fat juryman, who was
Court brewer, held out against his eleven brethren all
night, he gave way in the morning, and the Bishops
were acquitted. Even the soldiers of James' Army,
now encamped at Hounslow thirty thousand strong,
shouted for joy at the news. As for the Declaration, in
London only four parsons dared to read it, and their
congregations walked out in a body when they began.
At Scarborough the Mayor was tossed in a blanket by
the soldiers for ordering it to be read, and it was the
same story all over England.
And on June 10th had been born to James and Mary
Beatrice their only son — the child of misfortune, who
was to grow up too good for such a father. James gave
the midwife five hundred guineas. There was a rumour
that the boy was to be called Ludovicus Innocentius
Carolus Jacobus, but it was only James Francis Edward.
The Pope and the Queen-Dowager, Katharine, were
sponsors. William, in perplexity, sent to congratulate,
but his friends told him this was a false step. ' No one,'
they said, ' believes the Prince to be of royal birth ;
he was smuggled into the palace by Father Petre in a
warming-pan ; none of the Royal Family or great officers
of State were present at the delivery ; of course it is a
fraud.' It was true that none of the usual precautions
had been taken ; but the facts were that the Queen had
70 INVITATION TO WILLIAM
not expected her baby so soon, and that few respectable
Protestants were in the habit of going to Court. Sixty-
seven persons were, however, in St. James' Palace at
the hour of the birth, and Lady Sunderland, who would
have been sure to betray the secret if there had been
one, was at the bedside. James, however, was stark
mad not to have sent for Princess Anne. Whether
William believed the warming-pan story or not, it was
obviously his cue to pretend to believe it. Mary seems
at first really to have believed it ; reasonable people
gradually abandoned the belief. Anne, who had for
months been suspicious as to the reality of the Queen's
pregnancy, writes : — " It may be our brother, but only
God knows ; St. James' Palace is just the place to
play a trick in — for one who believes, a thousand dis-
believe ; for me, I disbelieve." Mary told Anne that
her absence from town had been ' an irreparable fault.'
There was a bonfire for the Prince in Magdalen, now a
Papist seminary, but nowhere else in once loyal Oxford ;
on the night of the Bishops' acquittal England had
blazed with bonfires.
And on that night was despatched to the Hague, in
the deepest secrecy, a letter to William, saying, " Come.
Come swiftly before he calls his sham Parliament. Come
as the husband of the heiress of Great Britain. Demand
a free Parliament and security for Protestantism." It
was signed by Lords Danby, Shrewsbury, Devonshire
and Lumley, by Bishop Compton, by Edward Russell
and Henry Sidney. Halifax and Nottingham, too
cautious to sign, knew of it and, whether approving or
not, at least did not betray it.
Obviously now ' security for Protestantism ' would
mean something more than security for the Anglican
WILLIAM'S CHANCES 71
Church. The wrongs of that Church alone gave men
courage to summon the Prince of Orange ; but the
Presbyterians would have to be considered in the
settlement. Halifax had reassured them on this point,
although anonymously. Even Sancroft, the highest of
High Churchmen, was willing to give them a good
measure of toleration. William, then, would be the
champion of a combination similar to that which had
brought back King Charles in 1660. From the date of
this letter William's cause gained ground steadily, and
the Dutch Estates began to postpone their jealousies
and fears. Diplomacy was successful with the Princes
of North Germany. The old Elector of Brandenburg,
who remembered the Thirty Years' War, died in August,
muttering as his last words, ' Amsterdam — London ' ;
and his son at once sent to William's service old Marshal
Schomberg, now a Protestant exile from France and
reputed the first soldier in Europe. The Landgraf of
Hesse promised to defend Holland if she were attacked
in William's absence. The Hanover rats, who were
ultimately to profit by it all, held off till the last
minute, but even they joined the Protestant cause at
last. All seemed to depend on what Louis XIV. would
do with his fine Army, then massing in his Eastern
provinces. Had he taken the advice of his great
Minister, Louvois, he would have struck at Holland at
once and so paralysed William ; but he was extremely
sore with James for refusing an open offensive alliance,
and he perhaps remembered the events of 1672, when
his soldiers had had to wade home. Therefore, in
September, he suddenly struck at the middle Rhine
and laid siege to Philipsburg. This banished the last
hesitation of the Dutch Estates, which now allowed
72 JAMES' CHANCES
William to go with their blessing, forty ships-of-war and
14,000 men. Yet this force would be too small for a
serious fight with the British Army and Navy. Could
James rely on either ?
Since '84 the Navy Board had disposed of £400,000 a
year and done its work well. There were 105 ships-of-
war, nine of which were ' first-rates.' The Britannia,
of 1,715 tons and 100 guns, was the finest ship afloat.
Admiral Lord Dartmouth, if not a great sailor, was
devotedly loyal, and James in middle life had been
thoroughly popular with the Service. But many of
Dartmouth's captains were in the Orange interest, and
the main deck and lower deck were Protestant to their
last plank. As for the Army, it was commanded by a
foreigner who had been created Lord Feversham, and
Lord Churchill, its real working head, though profuse
in lip-loyalty, would sell everything, except his Protest-
antism, for his own advancement. There was great
discontent in the ranks on account of the frequent
drafting in of Irish Papists. Still, if James, hitherto
distinctly a warrior, could have put himself at the head
of either Service, one does not see how either could have
refused to fight. Old Ormond, the last of the Cavaliers,
had just shut his eyes on the scene, cetat. 79.
The descent was naturally expected on the East coast,
and Dartmouth's Fleet was gathering in the mouth of
the River, when, at the end of September, Sunderland,
either treacherously or in fear for his head, persuaded
James to a complete reversal of his home policy. To
the astonishment of the world, a proclamation suddenly
appeared, excluding Catholics from the coming Parlia-
ment. This was rapidly followed by the abolition of
the Ecclesiastical Commission, the restoration of charters
LANDING OF WILLIAM, NOVEMBER 5TH 73
to towns as before the late changes, the restoration of
Compton to his See and of the Fellows of Magdalen to
their College. Writs were prepared for a real and a
free Parliament. But, about the same time, copies of
William's Declaration began to find their way to England,
and the ' concessions ' had come too late. The De-
claration ignored the Prince of Wales ; William was
coming, ' as the husband of the heiress, to demand secu-
rity for the Protestant religion and a free Parliament.'
A terrible month of anxiety passed, and the wind blew
hard from the West ; James had a new weathercock
fixed on Whitehall and watched it all day. " If only it
will keep like this," he wrote to cousin Sophia in Hanover,
" I hope to be in a good condition to receive William "
(September 28). Again one compares instinctively
another wind-bound soldier called William, waiting in an
earlier September to spring upon an equally distracted
England. At the end of October James' purpose and
the winds of heaven again veered round. The King
dismissed Sunderland, promised Louis his alliance, and
put off issuing his parliamentary writs ; he sent for
the Bishops and demanded that they should denounce
William's proclamation, but they said they must first
consult the lay Peers, and told their master some
unpleasing truths. Suddenly, on November 1st, an
Easterly gale sprang up and carried the Dutch Fleet,
piloted by one Mr. Benbow, who began life as a butcher-
boy and ended it as an Admiral, past Lord Dartmouth's
scouts and down Channel ; and at William's peak
fluttered the ancient motto of his house, ' Je Main-
tiendrai.' Just in time to prevent him from being
swept past the Start came a lull, and he dropped
anchor at Brixham in Torbay — on a good Protestant
74 ADVANCE OF WILLIAM
day, November 5th ; and then the faithful wind roared
again from the West and drove Lord Dartmouth, who
had pursued, back into the Downs.
' The little Porpus,' 18 guns, was run ashore to
secure the landing of Mackay's six regiments of Scots-
Dutch in case of opposition. But opposition there
was none, and the rest of the Army followed. ' Our
foot and dragoons,' says my Dutch friend, ' ran up
the mountains and cliffs, which are horribly high, like
cats, . . . and every one shouted, " God bles jou " ; '
people even kneeled in the water to kiss William's hand.
A poor priest at a Catholic house hard by had mistaken
us for a French fleet and ordered a Te Deum and a grand
spread of food ; but ' instead of " Votre serviteur,
Monsieur," he was greeted with, " Yaw, Mynheer, can
you Dutch spraken ? " on which they all ran away and
we had a feast that had been prepared for others.'
William advanced cautiously to Exeter, and Dr.
Burnet, the historian, preached to him in the Cathedral
on Psalm cvii. The cannons and ammunition were sent
round to the Exe and landed at Topsham. People came
in slowly, but all stared in admiration at his fine troops,
Dutch, Nassauers and Swedes among them. But His
Highness was careful to put in the hands of British
soldiers all places where there might be a collision
with James' forces ; he was anxious to avoid the appear-
ance of subduing England by foreigners. Sir Edward
Seymour, the leading Tory of the West, proposed an
' Association for Defending the Protestant Religion and
the Prince of Orange,' and the ball began to roll. The
Prince's route was Ottery, Axminster, Crewkerne, Sher-
borne, Wincanton. On the 19th James, who had just
seen his little son shortcoated, joined his Army at Salis-
HELPLESSNESS OF JAMES 75
bury : but, when Churchill urged him to go further to
the front, he was seized with a violent bleeding of the
nose which would not stop. On the 23rd, on which
day the sceptre fell from the hand of Bloody Mary's
statue at the Royal Exchange, he decided to retreat to
London. Then the debacle began, Churchill's own
defection giving the example. Every one hastened to
greet His Highness as the Deliverer of England. Dela-
mere raised Cheshire, Danby raised York, Nottingham-
shire and what the Dutch historian terms ' Darkyshire ' ;
the Princess Anne fled from London towards Danby.
Papists were everywhere disarmed or imprisoned. The
London mob rose and sacked Papist chapels and houses.
James, when back in London, finding he couldn't sleep
without taking opium, called a Council of Peers and
Bishops, which simply advised him to treat with William.
He consented, though only in order to give time for the
escape of the Queen and Prince to France. He chose,
as emissaries to his rival's camp, Halifax, Nottingham
and Godolphin, and the first of these was already going
over to the Orange interest ; Lord Clarendon would
have been a better choice, for his solution was the
Regency of William, and the recognition of the Prince
of Wales as heir.
The Commissioners met William at Hungerford, and
the latter sensibly proposed an immediate Parliament
to sit in a neutral zone between the two Armies ; he also
asked for the principal fortresses to be put into trusty
Protestant hands. But Halifax gathered that William
would be glad if some one could frighten James into
flight ; and flight was just then the one thing that
appealed to that once warlike person. On December nth,
when William, without further treating, had advanced
76 FLIGHT OF JAMES
almost to the gates of London, James fled from Whitehall
by night, and threw l the Great Seal into the River at
Vauxhall, thus comforting himself with the thought of
leaving anarchy behind him. But unfortunately he was
recognized, roughly handled and arrested at Feversham,
and William was obliged to send some guards to protect
his person. He actually returned to London for one
day ; but, ' not thinking it convenient to expose himself
to be secured,' as he put it, and finding Whitehall almost
a desert, and every one gone to his rival's Court, he
allowed himself to be escorted by boat to Rochester,
whence he fled, this time successfully, to France.
Louis received him with most magnanimous kindness,
and gave him the beautiful palace of St. Germains
to live in. The French courtiers found Mary Beatrice
charming and queenly, but thought James intolerable.
After the failure of his attempt on Ireland in 1689-90,
which is narrated in a later chapter, and after the
failure of at least one attempt to assassinate William,
James took to devotion ; he wrote pious treatises ; he
went, like a modern Puseyite, into ' retreats,' died in
sackcloth in 1701, and had miracles performed at his
tomb.
If his nose had not bled at Salisbury. . . . ?
1 Or perhaps ■ accidentally dropped.' He may have in-
tended to take the Seal with him. In either case the result
would be the same. There can be no Government without a
Great Seal.
CHAPTER III
"JE MAINTIENDRAI"
With the second flight of James on December 23rd, the
first stage in the ' Glorious Revolution ' was over ; there
was a blank parchment, on which could be drawn a new
title, a new charter, perhaps a new form of government.
But drawn by whom, and in what letters ? On the nth
those Peers who were in London had held a meeting and
had called out the Trained Bands to keep order, but they
had not invited William to London. He, however, on
the 1 8th, had come uninvited and had taken up his
quarters at St. James' ; while there he had been much
pressed to have himself proclaimed King, as if by con-
quest, and had rejected the suggestion. But he had
assumed command of all the English Army as well as
of his own, and had disposed of the most trustworthy
regiments in garrisons round the capital. On the 23rd
(the day of the second flight) he called a meeting of
the Peers, and added to them all members of any of
Charles II. 's Parliaments who happened to be in London,
plus the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and fifty Common
Council-men of the City ; this body entrusted him with
the civil and financial administration, and with the duty
of calling a ' Convention.'
The elections to this Convention took a month, and
when it met on January 22nd, Halifax was elected
77
78 THE CONVENTION MEETS, 1689
Speaker of the Lords, and an old Exclusionist Speaker
of the Commons. That obviously meant that the
majority of the Lower House was Whig, although that
of the Upper House, which now numbered 150 persons,
was on the whole moderate Tory. Both Houses at once
confirmed William's temporary authority, and then fell
to the discussion of the questions, " Is there a King,
and if so who is he ? If there isn't, who shall he be ? "
The Nation, outside Parliament, was in a terrible
ferment ; the only thing upon which it was united was
its old and entire detestation of Popery, and nine-tenths
of the booksellers' advertisements of the year are con-
cerned with tracts against, or skits upon the Romish
Church. Dread of France was perhaps the next greatest
passion. ' A Gentleman of Cheshire, lately arrived out
of Ireland,' put the matter in a nutshell when he wrote
a pamphlet entitled, ' K. William or K. Lewis, wherein
is set forth the absolute necessity these nations lie
under, of submitting wholly to one or other of these
Kings ; and that the matter of controversy is not now
between K. William and K. James.'
In the Convention, however, there seemed at first to
be great difficulties in finding any possible solution. To
some of the highest Tories, notably to the always honour-
able Earl of Nottingham, the best solution seemed to
be to elect William as Regent for King James, to whom
the nominal title might be left ; and, in the Lords, this
proposal was only defeated by two votes. On the
whole both Houses could just manage to agree that
' the late King James, having, by the advice of Jesuits
and other wicked persons, withdrawn himself from the
realm, hath abdicated the throne ' ; but the Lords
made a fierce fight before they would pass the next
WILLIAM AND MARY, KING AND QUEEN 79
clause, ' that the throne is thereby vacant.' Danby,
always attached to the person of Mary, and leader
of the moderate Tories, said the throne could not
be ' vacant ' ; Mary, he said, had succeeded at the
moment, whatever that was, of her father's abdication ;
was in fact Queen. This idea was to William even
worse than that of a Regency ; he would not be his
wife's ' gentleman usher.' The Whigs of course were
for William, and for a very strictly limited William —
a Whig puppet-King. Finally Halifax suggested the
curious compromise ' and that our Sovereign Lord and
Lady, William and Mary, are and are declared to be King
and Queen ' ; the administration of the Sovereignty to
rest in William. Observe the wiliness of the words ; we
do not elect these persons ; they are : we now merely
' declare them to be ' ; at what moment they began to
reign we do not specify.
Several subordinate clauses are annexed to the vote,
e.g. ' that it is inconsistent with the welfare of a Pro-
testant state to be governed by a Popish prince ' ; that
James had ' broken the Original Contract between King
and people ' (whatever that figment of the imagination
might be). And, before we tender the crown to these
persons, we get them to agree to a document of
great importance, in which some would see a sort of
new Charter, others just an epitome of Stuart mis-
government, called the ' Declaration of Right,' which
in October, after we have voted ourselves to be a
Parliament, we turn into the ' Bill of Rights.' In this
document, together with the old declaration against
the levying of money without consent of Parliament,
with denunciation of ' illegal and pernicious ' Courts
such as the Ecclesiastical Commission, with confirmation
80 THE BILL OF RIGHTS, 1689
of privileges such as freedom of speech in Parliament
and the right of petitioning, we find it enacted ' that
the maintenance of a Standing Army in time of peace
without consent of Parliament is against law ' ; that
the Dispensing power ' as it hath been exercised of
late ' is illegal ; and that ' Parliament ought to be held
frequently.' The semi-triumphant Whigs would fain
have gone further, and taken away the King's right of
pardon in impeachments, his power over the Judges,
and his right of summoning and dissolving Parliament.
But William would have fought hard against these
limitations of prerogative, and for the moment William
was as necessary to them as they to him.
On March 17th King James' coaches were drawn
into Hyde Park and there sold by auction. And so
the Revolution was finished ; Whiggish, and therefore
of course ' glorious.' In time it came to wear in the
eyes of Whigs (who have written most of our histories)
an almost sacred character ; yet to me it is a deity
somewhat difficult to grovel before, and mainly for
one reason — it led to the introduction of foreign
Kings, who, to use a phrase of Machiavelli's, ' bound us
to the fortune and arms of others.' James II. was as
impossible as you like — I toss him to every wolf in
Whigdom to worry ; if Mary had had a child, if one of
Anne's children had lived, I would never have been a
Jacobite. But when the alternative came to be an
unspeakable boor, who had no interests but German,
when James III. grew up into a simple, pious, valiant
young man of stainless honour, and of a Catholicism
infinitely broader and more tolerant than his father's,
when he was willing to sacrifice everything except his
private religion to the wishes of the English people,
tHE NON-JURORS 81
I for one would have voted for my legitimate and
native King.
This alternative, however, was in the future, though,
as early as April 23rd, '89, William wrote to Sophia,
" according to appearances, one of your sons will reign
here one day." Parliament now merely found it necessary
to settle the succession, after the joint lives and the life
of the survivor of the reigning Sovereigns, (1) on Mary
and her heirs, (2) on Anne and her heirs, (3) on William's l
heirs by any other wife. And Anne actually had a son,
the Duke of Gloucester, who lived to be nearly eleven,
and who was being educated by John Churchill, after-
wards Duke of Marlborough, when he died of smallpox
in 1700.
When this settlement of 1689 was complete, a new
oath of allegiance had to be imposed, and it was the
refusal of many pious clergymen, including Sancroft and
four more of the famous Seven Bishops, to take that
oath, that founded the schism of the ' Non-Jurors.' These
men remained at heart Jacobites, but seldom active
Jacobites ; they had, of course, to resign their sees and
benefices, but were not otherwise persecuted : they
continued to ordain and consecrate in a little Church
of their own — often comprising men of great learning
and of most devout lives — until the threshold of the Nine-
teenth Century.
The settlement was finished early in February, and
Mary was summoned in haste from Holland. She has
told us all her feelings in that most pathetic and beautiful,
but little read book, her own Memoirs ; and the con-
clusion with which that book leaves us is, that, if Rupert
1 Do not forget that William was the grandson of Charles I.,
whereas Sophia was only the granddaughter of James I.
VOL. Ill 6
82 CHARACTER OF MARY
was the flower of the Stuart race in action, Mary was
its flower in piety and contemplation. She was born in
'62 and was thus twenty-six at the crisis of her life ;
she had been married at fifteen and a half to a man who
never loved her till he lost her, but whose Dutch people
learned to love her very dearly indeed. In her, Puritanism
wears its tenderest and most attractive aspect, and is
wholly devoid of intolerance ; it is her own and not her
neighbour's sins which she for ever laments : the being
compelled to dethrone her father is a thing which she
feels God cannot forgive her, and yet her wifely duty to
her unfeeling husband is always paramount ; even when
she comes to believe that her father is plotting against
her husband's life, the sense of her own guilt remains.
As for the subsequent unkindness of sister Anne, she
looks on it ' as a punishment upon her and me for the
irregularity committed by us at the Revolution ; my
husband did his duty and the Nation did theirs, but,
as to our persons, it is not as it ought to be.' Her
anguish lest her father and husband should meet in
battle in Ireland, in 1690, is truly touching. In her own
country, when she returns to it, she feels herself a perfect
stranger, ' censured by all, commended by none : 'tis
hard for flesh and blood to bear neglect, especially coming
from a place [Holland] where I was valued too much.'
The English people, after the simple Dutch, seem to her
utterly irreligious, ' a noisy world full of vanity ' ; she
hates the Court ladies, who ' come in crowds to see me,
believing I have nothing better to do than to chat with
them.' When William went abroad, each year from
'90 till '93, he left her Regent, and, though she always
protests that she knows nothing of ' bussiness,' she hits
off to the letter the characters of all with whom she has
CHARACTER OF MARY 83
to act : ' Danby, to whom I must ever owe great obliga-
tions, yet of a temper I can never like ' ; Anne, ' seeking
to make herself a party, finding fault with everything,
affecting to laugh at afternoon sermons and to do in
little things contrary to what I do ' ; Lord Monmouth
(afterwards the famous Peterborough), ' mad, and his
wife who is mader governs him ' ; ' Devonshire too lazy
to give himself the trouble of bussiness ' ; ' Lord Tor-
rington, who lay drinking and treating his friends till
the French came upon the coast and had like to have
surprized him ' ; 'I will say nothing of my Lord of
Marlborough, because 'tis he of whom I could say most,
and who can never deserve either trust or esteem.'
Once, both Danby and William asked her what she
would do if the City rose against her during her Regency,
1 which they both thought likely to happen. ... I said
I couldn't tell how much frightened I should be, but I
would promise not to be governed by my own or others'
fears, but would follow the advice of those whom I
believed had most courage and judgement ; and, let
what will happen, I would never go from Whitehall.'
Then the dear woman goes on to say, ' I am by nature
extreme fearful ' ; whereas the truth is she didn't know
what fear was, because she trusted in God. William
praised her first three years of Regency, but scolded her
for mistakes in '93, for which we can hardly forgive him,
though she did. William had at least the sense to leave
the Church patronage to his devout wife, and the ex-
cellency of her Church appointments has never been
questioned ; in these she was guided by the saintly
Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft at Canterbury.
Such was the woman v/ho came up the river ' in five
hours from Margate to Whitehall ' (she must have had a
84 CHARACTER OF WILLIAM
good tide) on February 12th, '89, to receive on the next
day, together with her husband, a crown to the wearing
of which nothing could reconcile her. She found William
' grown extreme lean.'
Of the King's own character it is very much more
difficult to speak ; we may be sure that he was above
all vulgar ' ambition to be a King,' though he knew that
only as King could he fulfil his life's task of humbling
Louis XIV. But, being King, I think he would let no
scruples stand in the way of the fulfilment of that task.
If he was merciful to his enemies, he was, with one or
two exceptions, ungrateful to his friends. Men — almost
all men — were to him tools to be used on the diplomatic
and military chessboard ; their motives he invariably
rated low. His private morals were better, though not
very much better than those of contemporary sovereigns ;
and it is certainly hard to forgive him his infidelity to
Mary. He was in constant ill-health, even at Hampton
Court, and was always complaining of the London
climate, though it is difficult to believe that damp and
foggy Holland could have suited him much better ;
anyhow, either for this reason or for the sake of privacy,
he purchased and added to Kensington House, * the
little house in the wood, copied from a villa at the
Hague,' Mary calls it.
Intellectually, I am inclined to rate William high,
though not very high ; he was an admirable linguist,
though he had no interest in art or letters. He had
sound notions of the importance of Sea power, for he
realized how vital to English interests it was to show
a Fleet in the Mediterranean ; it was against Admiral
Russell's will that the King compelled his Fleet to winter
in Cadiz and to chase the Frenchman Tourville into
STATESMANSHIP OF WILLIAM 85
Toulon. As a soldier William failed conspicuously to
grasp details, and had no coup d'ceil for the possibilities
of a battle-field ; he made some dreadful mistakes, and
expected his men to redress them against overwhelming
odds. But in this resistance to odds he always set the
example ; the first to charge and the last to retreat.
If he was capable of grand strokes of strategy, of
forced marches and well-planned surprises, either ill-
luck or his impatience l in execution often robbed him
of their fruit. Mr. Fortescue hits him off well when
he calls him ' a brilliant amateur general.' As a
diplomatist he was more successful ; he could build
and keep together European coalitions, mainly it is true,
because he could pour the gold of England into the lap
of foreign princes. That he could not manage the
English Parliament is not much to his discredit ; for
his reign was one long struggle of hostile factions, each
seeking to humiliate him and to use him as a weapon
against its rival. But, as in military matters, so in
civil, he failed from his want of grasp of detail, from his
want of sympathy, from his cold temper, which, it is
to be feared, was only the manifestation of an essentially
self-centred heart. Finally, as all his interest lay in
foreign policy, we must give him enormous credit for
what he planned and prepared ; for on him fell the
whole weight of organizing European resistance to the
French Monarchy at the height of its power, and
the blows he dealt at that Monarchy were so severe
that it needed only a happier genius to perfect the
work which he had begun. In this respect he reminds
1 It is curious that a man so infinitely patient in politics and
diplomacy should have failed so often on the battle-field owing
to impatience.
86 TEMPER OF PARLIAMENTS
us of William Pitt, who, dying even younger than King
William, and in an even darker hour, had paved the
way for Castlereagh and Wellington, even as William
paved the way for
Jack of Marlborough
Who licked the Frenchmen thorough and thorough.
The parliamentary details of the reign are sordid to
the last degree. Both Whigs and Tories early learned
that William only cared for England as paymaster of
the Coalition against France, and so they didn't care how
they treated him : " There is a kind of affectation," says
Mary, in '93, " to do all that is insolent to the King
without fear of punishment : he is obliged to keep those
in his service who least deserve it, and who, he may
be sure, will not really serve him." Almost without
exception leading statesmen, even Danby, yea even
Halifax, entered into private communication with the
exile James, in order to secure their heads and fortunes
in case William's tottering throne should fall again.
Political morality simply ceased to exist, and Govern-
ment majorities, if kept together at all, were only kept
by heavy bribery. The jealousy, the vindictiveness, the
spite displayed by both parties were horrible, and, as a
result, the disrepute they brought to the English name,
and the mischief they wrought to the patriotic and
military spirit of Englishmen, are incalculable. A
tradition of ' opposition ' was then founded, the baleful
results of which were constantly manifest throughout
the Eighteenth Century, and which, in our own days,
has settled down into the continual gangrene which is
eating away the life of Great Britain.
Some good laws were indeed passed in the reign of
SETTLEMENT OF THE REVENUE 87
William ; the Toleration Act of 1690 was a necessary
consequence of the help given by the moderate Dis-
senters, e.g. the Presbyterians, to the Church against
King James ; it allowed liberty of worship to those who
would accept Thirty-five and a half out of the Thirty-nine
Articles ; but a plan for ' Comprehension ' of such Dis-
senters within the Church failed in spite of the efforts of
the King in its favour ; ' don't touch the Church ' became
a popular cry. Another excellent page of the Statute
Book was the new Treason Act of 1696, allowing to the
accused counsel in matters of fact as well as in matters
of law. But other ' reforms/ some of which have sub-
sequently proved beneficial, were mostly introduced to
spite King William. Such was the ' Triennial Act/
passed at the end of '94, after the King had once imposed
his veto ; there was now to be a new Parliament every
three years, and the Act remained in force until the
Septennial Act of George I. Again the ' Place Bill/
finally enacted in a milder form in 1706, was intro-
duced year after year in William's Parliaments, simply
in order to embarrass the Crown, by keeping Ministers
out of both Houses. The settlement of the Revenue
had a similar object ; and this is a matter of such
importance that we must devote to it a word or two of
special examination, and then perhaps dismiss it for
good.
We must distinguish carefully between the power of
the Crown to collect taxes, and its power to spend
them when collected. And, under the first head, it is
clear that the Crown had never, since Edward I.'s reign,
either in theory or practice, been free of some sort of
parliamentary control as to what money it could make
its subjects pay. It had, however, certain sources of
88 SETTLEMENT OF THE REVENUE
income such as the Crown lands, the sale of licenses
for wine shops, etc., which, whether usurped or not,
were exempt from parliamentary control : and these
formed the nucleus of what was now called the
' hereditary revenue/ Parliament had usually added
to this a ' life revenue ' from Customs, and, since 1660,
from the Excise. But for the last three centuries, addi-
tional taxes had always been needed, and these could
only be raised by parliamentary votes, and usually
from year to year. James II. had once been offered a
revenue of over a million and a half : William's first
Parliament cut this down to £1,200,000 and granted it
for only one year ; then, after various experiments, the
plan was adopted of making a definite separation of the
whole revenue into two heads. Using the old hereditary
revenue as the nucleus, the Houses added to it, from
the Excise, such sums as would produce £700,000 a year ;
and out of this, which it called the ' Civil List/ it said
the Crown must pay all its ' civil ' expenses ; i.e. all
charges other than those for soldiers and sailors. Far
too heavy charges at first lay upon this list, e.g. the
salaries of Judges and Ambassadors, and innumerable
pensions ; each King from William III. to George III.
left heavy debts, and the Civil List had to be several
times increased. But, in the Nineteenth Century, all
expenses of government were one by one removed from
this list, and our present King has a life grant of half
a million, out of which he has only to eat, drink and be
merry and charitable.
All the rest, from whatever source derived, Parliament
came to regard as a National, not a Royal income, and
kept an absolute control over it ; voted it from year to
year only, and insisted on knowing how it was spent.
THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM 89
Therefore, if the Crown wanted an Army or a Navy, it
must call a Parliament each year. It was one of those
happy expedients into which Englishmen so often tumble,
without foreseeing their consequences ; and it seems to
have orginated in a malicious and factious desire to tie
William's hands.
As to the expenditure, down to 1688, in theory, the
whole revenue, however granted, had been the King's
to play with as it pleased him ; in practice, however,
mediaeval Parliaments had often interfered with the
royal expenditure. Two Acts of Charles II. may be
regarded as the real origin of a modern ' Budget ' : and
the result of a Budget now is that Parliament allots,
either annually or permanently, each particular portion
of the revenue to a particular object of expenditure.
The King, through his ' Chancellor of the Exchequer,'
says every spring, ' I estimate the revenue of the coming
twelve months at so much ; I shall want so much money
for the Army, so much for the Navy, so much for this,
that and the other purpose ' ; and if the House of
Commons (now unfortunately a body incompetent to
deal with such matters) thinks he asks for too much,
it cuts down the amount in the ' Appropriation Act,'
which is passed at the end of the session. The Treasury is
forbidden to pay out any money, except for the object
to which Parliament has appropriated it, while an official
called the ' Auditor and Controller-General ' keeps a sharp
eye on the whole business. Mr. Gladstone once told the
present writer that the accounts of the nation could now
be intelligibly written on half a sheet of notepaper.
This, however, was only gradually arrived at, but it
was towards the end of William's reign that something
of this kind began. It was in many respects an un-
90 ECONOMIC CHANGES
lucky reign for new financial experiments : the Heavens,
as well as the Whigs and Tories, fought against the
cold, patient, iron man who sat on the throne ; there
was a series of disastrously cold and wet seasons, be-
ginning with the frightful Christmas Day of '89, on
which half a dozen ships of the Royal Navy were wrecked
in Plymouth harbour alone, and ending with the hurricane
of November, 1703, which demolished church steeples
by the dozen and strewed all our coasts with drowned
sailors. The Puritans had put fire and plague down
to the wickedness of the Stuarts ; no wonder the Jacob-
ites began in their turn to speak of the ' Causes of
God's Wrath.' Private as well as public morality was
at a low ebb ; there was a rage for speculation, and no
investments were very safe. Highwaymen abounded :
week after week the post was robbed by masked men
at Kingsland, or Whetstone or Hounslow ; smuggling
was an affair of enormous profit, if also of great risk.
Further, a great economic change was crippling the
revenue ; Parliament was becoming much more fiercely
protectionist, and was using the Customs duties no
longer to produce cash, but to exclude all foreign goods
except the raw material of English industries. ' Wars of
tariffs ' had begun ; when we go to war with France, we
clap on a 50 per cent, duty against all French silks,
wines, brandies, etc., with the result that the total
income from Customs falls almost one-half, and then
leaps up again at the Peace, when these duties will
probably be lowered. Another most serious make-
weight was the condition of the Coinage, which was
clipped and worn to an astounding degree : in the
year '96 all the silver of the country had to be called
in and recoined, at an expense to the Government of
NATIONAL DEBT 91
£1,200,000 ; and of course there were anxious months
before the new stuff could be turned out of the mint.
Finally it was a period of long and costly war and of
heavy subsidies to Allies. Five millions a year is not
an uncommon war-budget, between 1690-7 ; and this
is more than double anything previously known.
So new sources of income have to be found : window
taxes — a stuffy expedient ; taxes on hawkers and on
coaches ; taxes on existence, called poll taxes (we have
heard of them in Wat Tyler's time) ; taxes on birth,
burial and marriage ; and, lest you should escape the
last, on bachelorhood ; excises on salt and malt and
coal, in addition to those on beer and other malt-liquors ;
most important of all, a 'land tax/ at rates varying from
one-fifth to one-twentieth of your rent and of your income
generally. It was found impossible to make people pay
at anything like these rates ; at the very most the land
tax produced, when levied at the highest rate, only two
millions a year. Failing even by these stringent means
to balance its books, Government had to make unborn
generations pay for its wars ; in other words, it had to
borrow money at high interest, at first at 12, soon at
8 per cent. ; and the annual interest of this National
Debt was, at the death of William, already over a
million : now, although the rate of that interest has
been gradually reduced from 12 to 2 -J per cent., it is
over twenty millions a year. It is, of course, easy to
see the arguments against such a system, especially the
temptation which it offers to extravagant Governments
to throw the burden of their extravagance on posterity.
Far into the Nineteenth Century philosopher after philo-
sopher denounced the Debt : ' it must one day come to
the sponge,' was the favourite cry ; and it is conceivable
92 THE BANK OF ENGLAND, 1694
that a Government may one day exist, so wicked and
so dependent upon the votes of persons who have
neither savings nor industry, that it will use the sponge
and wipe off the slate the seven hundred millions which
Great Britain now owes. But, until that day, it is
obvious that a Debt, largely owed in small sums to
persons of very moderate fortune among her own sub-
jects, is an actual guarantee for her stability and even
for honest financial administration. The ease with
which the ' shares ' in this Debt can be bought and sold
encourages people to save, and to invest their savings ;
so great is the confidence in the solvency of the Nation,
that the ' state of the Funds ' (i.e. whether these shares
are selling high or low) is the surest index of prosperity,
the pulse by feeling which men will most surely
learn whether to expect peace or war. At the Peace
of Ryswick, 1697, ' the Funds,' perhaps for the first
time, ' rose rapidly.' Moreover in many cases it is fair
to throw part of the great burden of wars on posterity ;
two-thirds of our present debt was incurred in fighting
the French Revolution and Napoleon ; and, if we had
ceased to fight them, where would Great Britain
be now ?
The broker in the first regular establishment of this
Debt was an interesting society of rich merchants in
London, who in the year 1694 were formed into the
' Governor and Company of the Bank of England,'
and who got, in return for a large loan, the privilege
of issuing paper notes, each representing a promise to
pay, on presentation at their counter, a certain sum in
cash. The idea was originated by William Paterson,
a Scot, whom we shall meet later engaged in other
financial schemes, Gradually ' the Bank ' became the
THE STANDING ARMY 93
centre of the British money market, and the broker of
all loans to Government, the keeper of its cash-box
and the guardian of its credit : and ' bank notes '
became an integral part of the currency of the country.
The ' Old Lady of Threadneedle Street ' (see Leech's
cartoons in Punch) has often found herself constricted,
when ' money is tight ' ; has been subject to ' panics ' ;
has had ' runs ' on her, when every one has hastened
to present their notes and change them, quick ! quick !
for hard cash ; once (1745) her clerks were obliged to
pay in sixpences ; once, 1797-1822, Parliament actually
authorized her to refuse to change them on demand ;
but even then they continued to circulate, and were
depreciated only some 13 per cent. 1
One other Act of the reign deserves special notice
from its prospective importance. In 1689 one of the
regiments of James' old Army, being ordered to Holland,
mutinied at Ipswich, and, as there was no legal power
of controlling soldiers by martial law, except at the
seat of war, Parliament passed a temporary Act giving
the Crown such power against ' any person collected
into a troop for pay,' i.e. any soldier during the period
for which he has enlisted. The Act was renewed at
intervals during William's reign, and eventually became
the annual ' Mutiny Act,' and added another weapon
against despotism to the armoury of the Parliament ;
for, if Parliament should refuse to pass the Mutiny Act,
the Crown couldn't legally control its soldiers, just as,
if Parliament refused to pass the Appropriation Act, it
1 In 181 1 the hundred-pound bank note would only change for
eighty-seven pounds ; but it was believed by the Directors of
the Bank that this was due to the high price of gold, which was
up to £4 tos. per ounce.
94 FACTIOUSNESS OF PARLIAMENT
couldn't pay them. But he who enlists as a soldier
does not thereby cease to be amenable to the Civil
Courts also ; his enlistment is still a civil contract, and
he is very apt to find himself in an awkward place
if his commanding officer tells him to do something
which the Common Law thinks he ought not to do ;
e.g., he is called out to suppress a riot : his colonel
says, ' shoot ' ; if he shoots not, he is shot for dis-
obedience under the Mutiny Act ; if he shoots, he may
possibly be hanged for murder under the Common Law.
Nothing appears to have provoked our ancestors so
much as the sight of a red coat : no terms were too
bad for Tories and Whigs alike to use in denouncing
a Standing Army ; and, as we have seen, the Bill of
Rights actually declares it to be ' against law.' It was
' an engine of despotism,' ' a badge of slavery ' — the
Tories remembered Oliver's veterans ; the Whigs knew
what James II. had intended to do with his camp at
Hounslow. Both parties cried up the Militia — which
had run away from Monmouth's half-armed peasantry —
as the only ' constitutional force ' — a pretty force indeed
to oppose to the Army of Louis XIV., should he land
but a hundredth part of his 150,000 regulars ; they
cried up the Fleet, which had let Dutch William sail
past it into Torbay. Hatred of Dutchmen and of their
all-too-necessary Dutch King, blended with these cries;
and William, who felt before all things as a soldier,
drained the last drop in his cup of bitterness when in
1699 Parliament dismissed the gallant fellows who had
fought at Steinkirk and Landen, and cut down the
forces in England l to a much begrudged 7,000 men.
1 There were 12,000 in Ireland and 4,000 in Scotland, over
whom, of course, the English Parliament could claim no control.
PARTY CRIES 95
It was, indeed, madness to do this, when every one
knew that Louis was merely resting for another spring
forward.
Apart from these Acts, the factions in Parliament
were mainly occupied in crying out for heads, especially
for those of the King's Ministers, and in prosecuting
each other for peculation or for alleged treason.
The Whigs were bitterly disappointed when William
refused to execute a few dozen of the worst partisans of
the late King, and to enforce on all men an oath ' ab-
juring ' the Stuarts. The Tories fiercely denounced
Dutch ' favourites,' and eventually, with some justice,
made the King's old and faithful counsellor, William
Bentinck, now Earl of Portland, and some others dis-
gorge enormous grants of land which their master had
made to them. They also denounced the Bank, the
war taxes, the sending of a Fleet to the Mediterranean.
Both sides denounced the soldiers who were fighting for
us in Flanders, even while they voted large sums of
money to enable them to fight on. All this factious
temper offered endless facilities for Jacobite intrigue,
and there were plots after plots ; one very bad assassina-
tion plot in 1696 even produced a temporary popularity
for William and a largely subscribed ' Association ' to
defend his life and avenge his death. Mary's death at
the end of '94 shook the throne and even shook the man,
who felt perhaps some remorse on her account ; but he
soon recovered and went on in his silent, grim patience.
The death of the Duke of Gloucester in 1700 was an even
worse blow to the throne, for it necessitated a resettle-
ment of the succession, and a calling in of * Sophia
Electress of Hanover and her heirs being Protestestants ' ;
that * Act of Settlement ' we must discuss later.
96 DEARTH OF STATESMEN
When Halifax is gone — he died childless in '95 — it
is impossible to feel much human interest in any con-
temporary statesman, except perhaps the honest Tory
Nottingham and the Whig Lord Chancellor Somers,
who was, if not a very great lawyer, a truly good,
modest, learned and able man, the friend of Tillotson,
of Addison, Steele, Congreve, Locke and Isaac Newton ;
he was too good for the Parliament of the age, which,
after vainly trying to prove him guilty of complicity
in piracy, impeached him for allowing William the
use of the Great Seal to set to a Treaty with France in
1700. Charles Montagu, who was created, after the
extinction of the Savile title, Earl of Halifax, was a
convinced Whig and a most able financier, to whom
much of the success of the recoinage and of the Bank
was due ; he was a man of respectable character, but
intolerably arrogant and conceited, and the butt of all
Tory opposition at the end of the reign. Mary's uncles,
Rochester and Clarendon, were in many ways respect-
able men, but both intrigued with James, and Clarendon
had once to be sent to the Tower. Churchill, who had
turned the scale against James at Salisbury, and who
ruled Princess Anne through his wife, became Earl of
Marlborough at William's Coronation, and is believed to
have betrayed his secrets to France ; he even had to be
sent to the Tower on suspicion, though no one then
knew, or perhaps even yet knows the truth about his
treachery. William was so accustomed to treachery that
he soon readily employed him again, and he was in high
favour at the end of the reign. Godolphin, though he
cared more for horse racing than for politics, was also
treacherous, and corresponded with James to the end
of his life ; but he was too useful at the Treasury to be
AN EVIL GANG 97
dismissed. Sunderland, perhaps the blackest-hearted
villain in English history, had fled abroad in disguise
in October, '88, and enjoyed the distinction of being at
one time exempted from pardon both by William and
James. But he sneaked back in '91, wormed himself
into William's confidence, and even became for a few
years Lord Chamberlain. Edward Russell, who died
Lord Orford, was one of the Seven Lords who had in-
vited William to England ; he was Treasurer of the
Navy and Admiral of the Fleet, but he turned traitor
like the rest, and only his professional pride as a sailor
prevented him from losing the battle of La Hogue on
purpose. Danby became Marquis of Carmarthen and then
Duke of Leeds ; his actual overtures to James were
probably not very serious, but he was soon in trouble
for receiving an enormous bribe from the East India
Company. Truly the Ministers were an evil gang.
William always tried to select his servants from both
parties, but, as the House of Commons, at each triennial
election, was alternately Tory or Whig, he was driven
more and more to conciliate the party in power in that
House, by choosing Ministers of that party ; and he
was thus unconsciously feeling his way towards the
curious principle which lies at the root of modern Cabinet
Government.
Every summer William, with a sigh of relief, went off
to Holland or to Flanders to diplomatize or to fight,
leaving Mary, or after her death a committee of Peers as
Regents behind him ; so may we, with similar feelings,
follow him abroad to those fields where he and England
were really great. War was declared against France in
May, '89. There was real danger of a French descent,
especially after James had gone to Ireland in March.
vol. in 7
98 THE GRAND ALLIANCE
The French Fleet was actually greater than our own ; it
was in excellent fighting trim and ably led by Tourville,
and the plan of combining a Mediterranean Fleet from
Toulon with an Atlantic Fleet from Brest was already
well understood in France. In June, '89, Tourville
appeared in the Channel, in force far superior to the
English and Dutch Fleets, and beat Admiral Herbert,
now Lord Torrington, off Beachy Head. It was not a
serious defeat, and it was partly owing to the jealousy
of Russell, 1 who sent Torrington peremptory orders to
fight instead of going down and leading the Fleet him-
self. But it produced a panic in England ; Torrington
was sacrificed to this panic, tried by court-martial, and
never employed again. It is worthy of note that his
old * tarry-breeks ' captains, such as Shovell (who, as
a boy in the First Dutch War, had swum through the
enemy's fire with despatches in his mouth) and Benbow,
always believed in him.
Meanwhile William was knitting up alliances abroad,
and England joined the Grand Alliance in September.
In this were comprised (i) Spain, now governed by the
last of her Hapsburg Kings, a decrepit degenerate, who,
when he wanted a new wife from Germany, had to ask
for an English Squadron to escort her from Holland !
(ii) the Emperor, so busy with the Turks on his Eastern
frontier that he was wholly dependent on the Allies
to defend his Western ; (iii) the Elector of Brandenburg,
expecting to be entitled ' King of Prussia ' for his pains ;
(iv) the Duke of Savoy, expecting to be called King of
something else, he didn't mind what, a shifty fellow
who deserted us in 1696 ; (v) the King of Denmark, who
1 Partly also owing to the failure of the Dutch to understand
Torrington's really skilful tactics.
BATTLE OF CAPE LA HOGUE, 1692 99
expected and got very little except subsidies ; (vi) the
ruler of Hanover, ready to sell his soldiers or his soul to
the highest bidder ; he deserted in 1691, but came back
in return for the solemn promise of an Electorate ; and
finally (vii) Holland itself, which now definitely agreed
to combine its Fleet with our own, always under the
flag of an English Admiral. An overwhelming com-
bination, you would say, especially with such a soldier-
statesman as William to lead it ! But France faced it
with the utmost gallantry, at once on the Alps, the
Pyrenees, the Upper Rhine, the Netherlands and the Sea.
And on the whole, in the field she rather more than
held her own, but at a cost which even the ' King of
the richest kingdom in Europe,' as Louis undoubtedly
was, could not stand for long ; and, hard hit as England,
the ' Paymaster,' was by taxes, before the Peace France
was in a much worse condition.
The years '90 and '91 were, as far as William was
concerned, taken up with the campaign in Ireland which
I have narrated elsewhere. In '92 France, with a good
Jacobite conspiracy in her pocket, in which Admiral
Russell and possibly Marlborough were deeply involved,
sent Tourville to invade England, whose whole Army
was then being shipped over to Flanders. Mary acted
with swift and splendid courage, stopped the regiments
at the ports, sent my Lord Marlborough to the Tower,
and compelled Russell to go and fight. Russell sulkily
obeyed, and let Shovell win the battle of La Hogue for
him ; in force he was nearly double the French Fleet, but
calms and a fog fought for the French, and only about
half of our Fleet got into action at all ; even then we
let far too many French ships escape. Shortly after-
wards the French captured an enormous fleet of
ioo MARITIME AFFAIRS
merchant ships, English and Dutch, bound for Smyrna.
During the remainder of the war the Navy of France
played no important part, though her privateersmen,
especially the celebrated Jean Bart, preyed upon our
commerce in the Atlantic and the Channel with fearful
effect. No one as yet seems to have grasped the
importance of keeping up a constant blockade of the
French ports, and much of our naval strength in this
reign was wasted in attempts at effecting a landing
at some point in the Channel. In American waters
there was seldom much peace ; and it was the age of
the West Indian buccaneers or privateers, who preyed
on friend and foe alike, and it was certainly the age
of a good deal of maritime activity. One of the greatest
of English sailors, the ex-pirate Dampier, who was also
our first hydrographer, and, if one may coin a word,
our first anemographer, was making great voyages to
the Far East ; in 1699 he only just missed, owing to his
preference for warm latitudes, anticipating by eighty
years the discoveries of Captain Cook. However, La
Hogue had put an end to serious danger of invasion,
and Louis was now bending all his efforts to righting
William in the old ' cockpit of Europe,' the Spanish
Netherlands, which we then roughly called Flanders.
" I wish, Dr. Slop," quoth my uncle Toby, " you had
seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders."
Louis' campaigns here were intended to be mainly
wars of sieges : it is a country of rich towns admirably
fortified, and much cut up with great rivers ; an invader
who knows his business can keep the defender, even if
the latter be in superior force, trotting to and fro in a
harassed condition by menacing different fortresses, and
can then pounce from time to time on the most
THE WAR IN FLANDERS, 1692 101
convenient one. William, for his part, incessantly
manoeuvred to bring on a battle : in '91 he had failed
to do this, and the French captured Mons. In '92 three
French Armies appeared before the great fortress of
Namur, at the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse.
William, whose natural base was Brussels, and behind
that Holland, advanced to the relief, but Marshal
Luxemburg held all the bridges over the flooded rivers
and Namur fell at the beginning of June. This enabled
Luxemburg to threaten Brussels, for the relief of which
William hastened back. As both Armies manoeuvred on
opposite banks of the river Senne, William planned on
July 23rd a surprise for Luxemburg, who had taken
post near Steinkirk, and almost caught him napping ;
in a desperate strife, in which the first French line
broke to shivers, the Allies were ultimately defeated,
mainly because the Dutch commander, Count Solms,
withheld his division from supporting the attack. It
was one of the bloodiest battles of modern times, our
Guards and Cutts' regiment being almost annihilated.
William, however, conducted the retreat in slow and
admirable order, and Luxemburg's Army had been so
much shattered that he could attempt nothing more
that year.
Armies in those days moved slowly, and there was
always a long period of hibernation ; not till May, '93,
did Luxemburg concentrate his forces again at Mons,
to cover another French Army under Boufflers, which
was intended to conduct the sieges. William, still
based on Brussels, advanced to the Senne and took
post near Hal ; there during the month of June the two
Armies glared at each other. Early in July Luxemburg
moved off to his right, pounced on Huy, and threatened
102 THE WAR IN FLANDERS, 1693
Liege and Mastricht. William, whose right had been
extended to contain the French left near Tournay, was
obliged to hasten to his own left to save the great Meuse
fortress. He had thus but fifty as against eighty thousand
when he faced Luxemburg at Landen on July 29th ;
this time it was William who was on the defensive, and
in a badly chosen position. Yet we beat back two
successive attacks of the flower of the French troops,
and the French losses were not far short of our own.
As at Steinkirk, so at Landen, the brunt of the fighting
and all the glory of the defeat fell to the British troops ;
and, but for William's coolness and personal valour at
the end of the day, the whole Army would have been
annihilated. " Gallant mortal," cried my uncle Toby,
" this moment now that all is lost, I see him galloping
across me [to cover the retreat over the bridge of Neer-
specken] to bring up the remains of the English horse
to support the right, and tear the laurel from Luxem-
burg's brows if yet 'tis possible. I see him, with the
knot of his scarf just shot off, infusing fresh spirits into
poor Galway's regiment, riding along the line, then
wheeling about and charging Conti at the head of it.
Brave ! brave ! by Heaven ! he deserves a Crown."
These two actions alone are enough to cover the still
young British Army with an imperishable halo ; and
the heroes of them were Cutts (nicknamed ' the Sala-
mander'), Ramsay, Mackay (Dundee's old enemy, killed
at Steinkirk), Tollemache and the Huguenot Earl of
Galway. Luxemburg, shattered as he was, ended the
campaign with the capture of Charleroi, which gave
France the whole line of the river Sambre. The year
'94 found neither side in a position for any great
undertaking, but it was marked by a descent of an
THE PEACE OF RYSWICK, 1697 103
English force upon Brest which, being intended merely
as a feint, was by the rashness of our General pushed
too far, and ended in disaster and defeat. 1 William,
1 after spitting blood for a day and a night ' to the
horror of his wife, now so near her own unlooked-for
end, departed, as usual, to Flanders, where the status
quo was maintained all that year ; and, when '95
opened, it was manifest that the tide was beginning
to turn in favour of William and his Allies. For
Louvois, the great organizer of French victories, had
been dead two years, and now the fiery-hearted dwarf,
Luxemburg, had gone too. France seemed to be almost
on the defensive, and was laying down a long line of
fortified entrenchments stretching from Namur to the
sea. A greater strategist than William would have pierced
these lines with ease ; as it was he was able, though at
a great expenditure of men, to retake Namur in July.
It was the last bit of fighting he was to see ; in '96 there
was practically nothing, in '97 the Peace of Ryswick
was signed, and the first act of the drama was over.
The Treaty was signed in September, and by it Louis
renounced all his annexations since 1678 with the ex-
ception of Strasburg ; he recognized William as King of
England and promised to aid no more Jacobite plots.
This Peace was indeed a necessity for both sides : for
the French, because their great rich kingdom was almost
drained of resources ; for the Allies, because the Duke of
Savoy had deserted them and had thereby set free a
1 Marlborough is often accused of betraying the design to
Louis ; it is now certain that Louis knew about it before he
received Marlborough's information, and that Marlborough knew
that he knew of it. William also knew this and encouraged
Marlborough to write !
io 4 THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
whole new French Army, which had been busy fighting
his hardy Piedmont ese on the Alps. The real reason,
however, which moved the King of France to conclude
was the shadow of the enormous question of the succession
to the Monarchy of Spain. Perhaps we need again to
be reminded that this Monarchy still held the Southern
Netherlands, the Duchy of Milan, the Kingdoms of
Naples and Sicily, the Balearic Islands, the whole of
Central and Southern America except Brazil and Guiana,
the Philippine Islands in the Pacific, and the largest
and richest of the West Indies. But I don't think we
need trouble our heads to learn (unless for examination
purposes) the Table of Kindred and Affinity or the
terms of the Treaties, which seemed to give that suc-
cession to one or another non-Spanish claimant. Only
let us remember this ; by descent the Dauphin of France
was through his mother the right heir of the whole
Spanish inheritance, but Louis XIV. when marrying
that mother had solemnly sworn not to claim it. The
baby son of the Elector of Bavaria was the second
best heir, and, if oaths had meant anything, he should
have succeeded to the whole ; the astonishing thing
is that every diplomatist in Europe did not rally to
his claim, for he was a harmless candidate just because
Bavaria was a comparatively powerless State. The
third best heir was the Emperor Leopold of the House
of Austria, who traced his descent from Philip III. of
Spain, whereas the other two traced from Philip IV.
But oaths or no oaths, Louis XIV. had no intention
of ' letting go ' ; if he could not secure the whole
Spanish inheritance, he would grab at detached
pieces, he would ' partition ' the Spanish Monarchy.
To this Leopold, with characteristic Austrian tenacity,
THE SPANISH SUCCESSION, 1700 105
would have nothing to say, though he was willing to
disarm opposition by handing over the inheritance to
his second son, Charles.
As the life of Carlos II. flickered towards its feeble
close, the diplomatists of Europe, and William, the
champion of Europe, began to shudder at the very
possible prospect of something like Universal Monarchy
for France ; and Louis, who dreaded that Carlos might
bequeath the whole to the Bavarian baby or, worse
still, to the House of Austria, agreed in '98 to a
secret Treaty with William known as the First Par-
tition Treaty, by which the Austrians were to have
Milan, the Dauphin to have Naples and Sicily, and the
baby the rest. Then in February, '99, smallpox carried
off the baby, and William, tormented almost into his
grave and robbed, as we shall presently see, of almost
all his fine Army by his factious Parliament, consented
to a second Treaty, by which the Dauphin was to
have Naples and Sicily and also the Duchy of Milan,
which he was then to exchange for Lorraine, while
an Austrian Archduke was to have the rest (February,
1700). Then, and not till then, feeling in Spain,
hitherto pro-Austrian rather than pro-French, began to
declare itself in favour of the Power most likely to be
able to keep the whole inheritance together. Finally
on November 1st the King of Spain died, and, when
his will was opened, it was found that the whole inherit-
ance was bequeathed to Philip, Duke of Anjou, second
son of the Dauphin, on condition that the Crowns of
France and Spain should never be united. Louis, who
would never have sworn to the Partition Treaties if
he had foreseen this will, at once broke his oaths, both
the former and the latter, and accepted the will.
106 INFATUATION OF PARLIAMENT
And so the life work of William seemed to be thrown
away. Yet what could he do ? At the news of Ryswick
in '97 the Funds indeed had risen, but the King's power
had fallen. He had been, to Whigs and Tories alike,
merely an engine of war — something like one of those
' new-invented wheel engines,' four of which he had
taken with him to Ireland in '90, ' which discharge 150
musket barrels at once, and, turning the wheel, as many
more ; they are very serviceable to guard a pass.' ■
' Down with the Army ! ' was on every one's lips. It
was a Tory who moved, in December, '97, to reduce
the Army to the limits of 1680, and it was Whigs,
Jacobites and Republicans alike who howled a unani-
mous ' Aye ! ' The Parliament of 1698-9 was strongly
Tory, and the Army in England was reduced to 7,000
' native Englishmen ' ; the King's favourite Dutch
Guards were the first to be sent away. William was
so much hurt that he seriously meditated retiring to
Holland and letting England go to the French dogs
in her own parliamentary fashion. Even the accept-
ance of the Spanish will, and the insolent triumph of
Louis in his perjury, did not move England a whit ;
she seemed utterly blind to the danger ahead, even
when Louis, now assuming himself to be lawful master
in Flanders, ejected those Dutch garrisons which the
Peace of Ryswick had allowed to be established in
certain ' Barrier ' fortresses of that country. When
Parliament met, in February, 1701, William was only
able to speak to it of his desire to strengthen the
English Fleet, and this it cheerfully authorized him
to do.
1 These seem to be forerunners of the modern ' Maxim ■ ;
there are very few new things under the sun.
DEATH OF JAMES II. 107
But, as Louis went on, in the sight of all men, to
swallow the whole of Belgium, the temper of the Nation
outside Parliament began to change, and a symptom
of this was a celebrated petition from the Grand Jury
of Kent to the House of Commons in favour of a more
warlike attitude ; the House imprisoned the persons
who presented the petition. On the Continent war
broke out early in the summer ; the Austrians, at least,
were not going to submit tamely to such an unheard-of
attack on the ' balance of power.' And William was
clearly in communication with them, when an event
happened which threw the whole game into his hands.
On September 6th died at St. Germains King James II. ;
a few hours before his death Louis visited him and
assured him that he would recognize his son, Treaty or
no Treaty, as James III. When we say, as we often
do, that the King of France acted as a true gentleman
in doing this, we must remember that he thereby broke
another oath, that of Ryswick, in which he had solemnly
sworn to recognize William III. ; and it is part of the
duty of a gentleman to keep oaths inviolate. It was
not, however, the character of Louis, but his insolent
attempt to dictate to the people of England who their
King was to be, which moved even the House of Commons
to abandon its factious opposition ; in a new Parliament
at the end of 1701, though there was no complete Whig
reaction, an instant vote of absolute confidence in
William was passed ; an Army of 40,000 soldiers, a Navy
of 40,000 sailors and 10,000 marines, were voted, together
with subsidies for 10,000 foreign troops ; and the King
was authorized to negotiate for a fresh entry of England
into the Grand Alliance. An oath of abjuration of the
Stuarts was to be imposed on all persons holding any
io8 DEATH OF WILLIAM III., 1702
office or benefice, and a cruel Bill of Attainder against
the innocent young James III. was added. This was
in February, and early in March William had a fall from
his horse and fractured his collar-bone ; the shock, slight
as it was, was too much for his worn-out frame, and
on March 8th his silent, suffering, harassed life came
to an end. Ah ! could we then but have kidnapped
the gallant boy of fourteen, not yet saddened by ill-luck
and poverty, and brought him over here, who knows
but he might have proved a right English King ? But
we had to be content with * Good Queen Anne.'
And Good Queen Anne was now childless. On
July 30th, 1700, had died another gallant boy, her only
son the Duke of Gloucester ; and this had led to the
passing of the fatal Act of Settlement, by which, on the
death of Anne, the crown was to go to ' Sophia Electress
of Hanover and her heirs being Protestants.' William
had been strong for this ; but remember always that,
hero as he was in the field, and English as he was by his
mother, William was at heart no Englishman, and cared
very little for England except as leading member of
his splendid Coalition. Dismal Germans were to sit on
the throne of Elizabeth ; and there may well have been
old men alive in 1700 whose fathers or mothers had
watched by her pillow in March, 1603, and heard her
say * she would have no rascal's son in her seat.'
Sophia was a daughter of another Elizabeth, ' Queen of
Bohemia,' and so was granddaughter of King James I. ;
she was a woman of remarkable character and ability,
which her descendants, until Victoria the Great, did
not inherit ; but the Parliament, which now offered her
the throne, provided, with great discretion, in the Act
of Settlement certain definite limitations of her power
THE ACT OF SETTLEMENT, 1700 109
and of that of all future Kings of her line ; e.g., ' that
this Nation be not obliged to engage in any war for the
defence of ' — Hanover ; that ' such successor shall not
go without consent of Parliament ' — to Hanover ; that
1 no office under the Crown or grant of lands from the
Crown or seat in either House of Parliament shall be
held ' — by any person from Hanover. All these pro-
visions, as we shall see, were repealed or set aside by the
Hanoverian sovereigns. Still more important was the
insertion in the Act of some clauses which the Whigs had
tried in 1689 to get inserted into the Bill of Rights ;
e.g., that all matters of State shall be transacted in
the Privy Council, and all resolutions signed by those
Privy Councillors who have advised them ; that no
person . having an office under the Crown or a pension
from the Crown shall sit in the Lower House ; that a
person impeached by the Commons shall not be able
to plead against such an impeachment any pardon
which the Crown may have granted him ; that the
Judges shall be irremovable except after Address to the
Crown from both Houses. Unqualified approval can
be given only to the last of these provisions ; but, if we
take them all together, it becomes evident that they
were a deliberate and far-sighted attempt to settle the
basis of Sovereignty almost wholly in the two Houses
of Parliament, and to rob the Crown of all serious pre-
rogative ; that they were, in fact, the final solution of
that ' Problem of Sovereignty ' which the circumstances
of the Seventeenth Century had thrown upon the table
for discussion, and which kings, statesmen and philo-
sophers had successively attempted to solve, each in
favour of himself or of his partisans.
CHAPTER IV
"GOOD QUEEN ANNE"
No more uninteresting sovereign than Queen Anne
ever influenced the destinies of a great nation. In
Scottish phrase she was ' just a body,' in person homely
to the last degree, blear-eyed, at the end of her life very
fat, and with only one charm, a lovely voice ; to art,
music and letters equally dead ; very dull of intellect,
of a very obstinate temper and extremely superstitious.
In the midst of the most brilliant and witty society she
would chew the sticks of her fan for lack of conversation.
But she was kind to the poor and to old soldiers, she
was a devoted and affectionate wife and mother, and
she was capable of one great friendship beyond the
limits of her family. We must always remember that
she was in constant ill-health from her earliest youth.
She had many infants who barely survived their birth,
and many miscarriages ; the death, at the age of ten,
of her one promising boy, the Duke of Gloucester, must
have been a fearful blow to her (June 29th, 1700). In
her last years she was incessantly tormented by ague
and gout. She is said to have been passionately fond
of hunting in Windsor forest, but, as she pursued that
sport * in an open calash ' drawn by one horse, it must
have been of rather a mild kind.
She was thirty-seven at her accession, had been tutored
no
CHARACTER OF ANNE in
by Bishops Compton and Lake, courted in 1681 by
him who was afterwards George I., and married in
1683, at the age of eighteen, to a dull, jolly, honest
gentleman, fond of horse-racing and good living, called
Prince George of Denmark. In 1705 she paid a thousand
guineas for a race-horse as a present for her husband.
William had persistently snubbed that husband, but
had been prudent enough, after Mary's death, to seek
an immediate reconciliation with Anne and her friends
the Marlboroughs, who had been inducing her to write
penitent letters to her exiled father. There is no real
evidence that her father had ever forgiven her, but it
is quite possible that her feeling for him and her desire
for her half-brother's succession revived after the death
of her own son. In public she was always obliged to
protest her support of the Hanoverian Succession, al-
though, like Queen Elizabeth, she profoundly resented
the incessant speculations as to the events which would
follow her death.
The ' Church of England's Glory ' is the title which
a famous old song gives to Anne ; but it must be con-
fessed that neither Church nor Queen had any great
reason to be proud of each other. One most excellent
thing the Queen did for the Church when she resigned
the £17,000 a year which came to the Crown from the
old ' first-fruits and tenths ' (the ' Annates ' -of Henry
VII I. 's time) and made it into ' Queen Anne's Bounty
for the Augmentation of Small Livings ' ; but her Church
patronage was not nearly so wisely exercised as that
of her sister had been. And the Church was no longer
the Church of Laud or even of the Seven Bishops ; much
that was best in that old Church had passed over to
the Non- Jurors ; the learning and the piety were gone
ii2 STATE OF SOCIETY
while the intolerance remained and became a political
force, concentrated on hatred of Dissenters. No words
were too bad for the High Church clergymen to use in
describing the Low Church Bishops appointed since the
Revolution ; of ' canonical obedience ' they recked as
little as their successors to-day. Convocation, which
had been prudently muzzled by William, now met
unchecked, and fierce invectives by its Lower against
its Upper House were of constant occurrence. In the
really religious movements of the time, the ' Society for
the Reformation of Manners,' which was trying to purify
the stage, the ' Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge' (founded 1699), and the 'Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel ' (founded 1649, but dating
all its development from the period before us), the
High Churchmen took little part, and as little in the
foundation of charity schools, many of which now owed
their origin to Dissenting communities.
* Manners and morals ' do on the whole become dis-
tinctly more modern, not always with good results,
during the reign. Material prosperity was fairly high ;
the ' hungry years ' of William's reign were over, yet
wheat was usually well over 40s. a quarter. London
was becoming more and more ' the fashion,' and,
in London, the centres of fashion were Bloomsbury,
St. James' Square and Piccadilly. Kensington, still a
rural village, was already full of fine houses and gardens.
Drury Lane and the Haymarket were the only two
theatres, and the stage was still very wicked ; in 1706
twenty-four actors were indicted for immorality and
profaneness. But before the end of the reign the in-
fluence of Addison and of Steele had begun to purify
the literature of fiction and, to some extent, the Drama.
AMUSEMENTS 113
Anne forbade the Opera to be performecHn Passion Week.
Executions were fewer than before, though women were
still occasionally burned at Tyburn for false coining.
Bull- and bear-baiting were no longer fashionable for
the upper classes, though Hockley Hole was still crowded
twice a week by the lower — the keeper of the bear-
garden there was killed by one of his pets in 1709 —
and cock-fighting was still the sport of gentlemen. Art,
except that of portrait-painting, was not ; but Handel
came to England in 1710, and began to stimulate a taste
for music which had never wholly died out. Cricket,
which, in some shape or other, had been a boys' game
before the end of the Sixteenth Century, was now a
sport for men, and we find frequent references to matches
at it, though these were always played for money.
Gambling and horse-racing were the curses of the age,
and gambling on the infant Stock Exchange was ac-
companied with frequent failures. In Luttrell's Diary
we may read how such-and-such an ' exchange-broker
who dealt mostly in .Stocks,' has ' gone aside ' (a sweet
euphemism) for £100,000. He also records the betting
at the coffee-houses, of which there were said to be 3,000
in London, on the events of the war abroad. We are
brought near to our own days of silly excitement over
silly feats when we read of a German, aged sixty-four, who
wagers that he will walk 300 miles in Hyde Park in six
days, and does it with a mile to spare ; still nearer when
we read of the great difficulty with which the Govern-
ment was confronted before it could hang for murder
a famous prize-fighter l who was a popular favourite ;
nearest of all, perhaps, in the fuss made about the pro-
secution of Dr. Sacheverell, which is probably the first
1 Cook, a Gloucester butcher.
VOL. Ill 8 ;
ii4 A 'MODERN' AGE
instance of a newspaper-fed agitation. The first daily
journal, the Daily Courant, dates from 1702, but there
were already fifty-five weekly papers. There is a penny
post within London from 171 1 ; there are flying coaches,
doing their fifty miles a day, in the South of
England ; the turnpike system is extended over all the
home counties ; there are regular packet-boat services
to Calais, Corunna, Holland, Dublin, Lisbon, New York
and the West Indies. In April, 1710, four Indian
' kings,' or sachems, come to London to offer their
services against the French in Canada ; they are lionized
about London by the Lord Chamberlain, ' and 'tis
said they'll go over and have a view of our Army in
Flanders.' Perhaps these children of the forest were
being ' run ' by an American syndicate. How ' modern,'
too, that the Government should find it cheaper to have
ships-of-war built by private firms than in its own dock-
yards, that Lord Fairfax should take out a patent for
the fishing up of Spanish wrecks in the West Indies,
that collieries at Newcastle should ' take fire and blow
up,' that the Treasurer of the African Company should
' go off with their money and their books/ that seven
thousand destitute Germans should come to England
in a single year (1709), and that foreign Protestant re-
fugees should earn money at Wandsworth for making
red hats for Cardinals at Rome.
In the department of literature men have spoken of
the ' Augustan Age of Anne ' ; the epithet seems to me to
be ill-chosen, for no great poet reached his full maturity
during her reign. Dryden, indeed, almost lived into
it, dying in 1700, and Pope was twelve at her accession ;
in 1709 he published his ' Pastorals,' and three years
later his exquisite ' Rape of the Lock ' ; but his ' Homer '
LITERATURE 115
was only just begun when the Queen died. In
prose, however, a new era is noticeable, and had been
inaugurated by Dryden, who was perhaps the first
1 writer for bread/ the first ' professional ' in the craft
of literature. A professional who is to succeed must
hit the taste of his public ; the ' reading public/ though
not educated up to the standard attained by a few in
the Sixteenth Century, had vastly extended in number
since the Restoration, but like other ' publics ' it craved
amusement rather than elevation, it did not want to
fatigue its brains. Dryden and his successors knew
this, and, if they simplified style and clarified grammar,
they rejected also the glowing imagery in which the
lofty thoughts of the Elizabethan and Caroline writers
had been expressed. In reading Milton, or Sir Thomas
Browne, or even Clarendon, we often feel that the
author's great ideas outrun his power of expressing
them ; but Dryden, Temple, Addison, Swift and Defoe
are perfect masters both of thoughts and pen. Addison,
the great essayist, is perhaps most typical of the smooth,
polished and somewhat heartless society which he
amused with his Spectator ; we are sorry for our erring
or unfortunate brother when he goes under in the race
of life ; but we do not lend him ten pounds ; we tap
our snuff-box, say ' Stap my vitals/ and pass on to a
rout at a Whig duchess's house. Men's benevolence
seems to be smothered in those monstrous wigs which
they wear.
One remarkable fact about literature remains to be
noted ; the leading writers were now used by the
Government for party purposes, as they never were
before or since. The Whig or the Tory party of
the day would sooner sacrifice the head of its leader
n6 DR. JONATHAN SWIFT
than the pen of its drudge. That Addison and Steele
should have written political pamphlets is, perhaps, not
surprising, but that two of the most imaginative writers
of any age, Defoe and Swift, should have put themselves
in harness, is very surprising. The Whig Ministers want
something trenchant and ' slashing,' to win votes at an
election ; and Defoe, a hasty writer who never corrected
his sheets, knocks them off an article in The Review,
which is hawked all over London with immense success.
Swift, by his ' Conduct of the Allies,' of which n,ooo
copies were sold in a month — November, 171 1 — or by
his incredibly base ' Vindication (!) of the Conduct of
the Duke of Marlborough,' powerfully stimulates, if he
does not actually create, a Tory reaction in the middle
of a Whig war, the most triumphant war in which
England had ever been engaged. Both these writers
were masters of almost perfect irony, as well as of
literal, pictorial and coarse description ; no one could
1 decompose a subject into its elements ' like Swift.
To Defoe such hack work seems to have brought no
shame, as long as it brought pay ; Swift, however,
probably got to loathe his friends almost as much as
his foes, and deepened his hatred of mankind in the
process.
In Parliament faction was nearly, if not quite as bad
as it had been in the preceding reign. That the results
of the factious spirit on the position of the Empire were
not utterly disastrous was largely due to the unrivalled
patience and conciliatory spirit of the great Duke of
Marlborough. The principle underlying the history of
the period is very simple. The Government is com-
mitted from the outset to a great war in order to check
the ambition of France ; it is a truly national war for
THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH 117
national defence and for expansion of Empire ; but to
the Tories it looks like a Whig war. The Ministries
are at first mixed, but. tend to a preponderance of
Whigs ; as they become Whiggier and Whiggier the
Tory opposition to them and to the war becomes
nastier and nastier. When, by 1709, the British objects
of the war are practically attained, the Whigs are
accused of prolonging it for their own interests, and
the Tories get upon their side a quite reasonable cry
for peace. But they strive to bring about this peace
by the most shameful and underhand methods, and
disgrace themselves indelibly by their ingratitude to the
great commander who has raised the English name to
the highest pitch of glory.
John, Earl of Marlborough, who became a Duke at
the Coronation, was now fifty years old ; his treacheries,
both to James and William, though they must for ever
stain his memory, were now left behind him, and the
remainder of his active life was to be given to the glory
of his country, which even his passionate love of money
nevermore induced him to betray. To his wife, the
once beautiful Sarah Jennings, he was even more devoted
than to his riches ; and that wife had been since 1683
the bosom friend and counsellor of the Princess who now
sat on the throne. Nominally a Tory, Duke John was
emphatically no party man, and, even at the worst
period of his life, had never joined in the parliamentary
persecution of Whigs. William had sent him to Vienna
in 1701 to negotiate for the renewal of the Grand Alliance,
and he then became plenipotentiary at the Hague with
the same object. A Knight of the Garter, Commander-
in-Chief not only of the English, but of all the Allied
forces, Master-General of the English Ordnance, he
n8 OBJECTS OF THE WAR, 1702-13
held, when we declared war in May, 1702, a position
almost royal. He had need of all the power and all
the prestige he could command if he were to keep to-
gether and ' keep good ' the discordant elements of the
Alliance ; but his tact and his patience were infinite,
and he succeeded in his object as, perhaps, no other
diplomatist has ever succeeded. The Alliance nominally
consisted of the same Powers as that formed by King
William, for Savoy was now again detached from France,
and there was an Austrian gentleman upon our side
who called himself, and whom some few Spaniards
called, ' King of Spain.' But, the object of the Allies
being the break up, and the object of the French the
maintenance of the Spanish Monarchy, the heart of the
Spanish people was with King Louis of France and with
Louis' grandson, King Philip of Spain ; and another
great advantage was now on the side of France, namely,
the possession of the Spanish Netherlands, where Philip
had been readily received as King of Spain, and, there-
fore, Duke of Brabant, Count of Flanders, etc., etc.
France could thus begin her campaigns by threatening
Holland instead of having to fight her way through a
country bristling with carefully lortified cities as in
William's time. It is, then, not wonderful that our
Dutch friends should desire to keep the Allied Army for
the defence of their own frontier, and should, therefore,
throw all obstacles in the way of the great Duke's in-
cessant determination to seek out the largest French
Army he could find and beat it in the field. Over these
and over all other obstacles, down to the year 1710, the
genius of ' Corporal John/ as his adoring soldiers called
him, invariably triumphed. Let us see what were the
means at his disposal, and how he utilized them.
MARLBOROUGH'S ADVANTAGES 119
In the first place the English (after 1707 the ' British ')
Parliament, down to 1710, voted large and ungrudged
supplies for the war. Inconvenient Ministers like the
crabbed old Rochester and the honest but limited
Nottingham, who wanted a naval war only, were easily
got rid of. Godolphin, nominally a Tory, was Lord
Treasurer and a warm friend of the Duke ; Harley and
St. John, who came in as Secretary of State and Secretary-
at-War respectively, at first did what they were told
to do, and only began to intrigue about 1707 ; when
they were dismissed in 1708, Walpole, an admirable
financier, took St. John's place ; and, though the Tory
Opposition incessantly plied the cry of " Church in
Danger ! " and endeavoured to stimulate a ' Church fever/
as an antitoxin to the war fever, the career of victory
proved until about 1709 irresistible to the English
people. In the second place, Marlborough had an
incomparable second, both in diplomacy and in the
field, in Prince Eugene, of the House of Savoy, who
commanded the Imperial troops. Eugene was now
forty yearrs of age, and had already reaped his laurels
on many bloody fields against the Turks ; he was ani-
mated by a personal hatred of Louis even greater than
that of William ; he seems to have been unacquainted
with Marlborough till 1703, and their first meeting
only took place a few weeks before Blenheim. Thirdly,
in Cadogan Marlborough possessed one of the best
Quartermasters-General known to history.
But these were almost the only advantages with which
our great General started. The jealousy of Allies in the
field is proverbial, but these Allies thwarted him and
each other in a quite exceptional manner. On him fell
all the arrangements to be made for the war in all places
120 THE ALLIES
at once : on the Upper Rhine, in Spain, in Italy, by sea
and in America, as well as in his own immediate theatre,
the Netherlands ; and, except by Eugene, he was badly
served in almost every quarter. The greatest hindrance
came from the constant presence in his own Army of
two Civil Commissioners from the Estates of Holland.
These worthy gentlemen, being, as I have already said,
of the opinion that the defence of their own frontier
was the main object of the war, thought it sheer madness
to fight battles when they could be avoided, and again
and again they interposed a direct veto upon operations
which they considered hazardous. On the Upper Rhine
there was slow old Ludwig of Baden with a strong
German force. He had been fighting bravely for fifty
years ; in 1705 he actually expected the whole campaign
to be delayed a month because he wanted to go and
' drink the waters.' When he died, in 1707, he was
succeeded by an incompetent sulky boor, the Elector
of Hanover, afterwards George L, who took upon himself
to be jealous of Eugene. The Austrian Prince who now
called himself Charles III. of Spain, and for whose title
we were supposed to be fighting, had a double dose of
original stupidity and obstinacy ; he visited England in
1703, and stayed at Petworth and several other country
houses, where he found himself so comfortable that it
was with great difficulty he could be got to embark for
Spain ; when he got to that country he only thwarted
all the plans of the brilliant but erratic British General,
the Earl of Peterborough. In 4> Italy the stress of the
war fell on Eugene, and on tne whole troubled Marl-
borough little. None of the Admirals really understood
the Duke's far-reaching plans of naval strategy, which
looked for the destruction of Toulon and the command
THE BRITISH ARMY 121
of the Mediterranean. To America he was able to pay
little attention ; the Tories did indeed send expeditions
to Quebec, to Newfoundland and the West Indies, but
they were unpaid, unclothed, unfed ; only the offscour-
ings of the Army could be spared for them, and if
battalions were withdrawn for them from Flanders it
was against the Duke's will.
The transport system was shocking, and, whenever
Marlborough was not present in person, mismanagement
was rampant both aboard and ashore. " We lay at
anchor five weeks," says Private Deane, "off Tynemouth,
waiting for orders, having only the bare deck to lie
upon, which hardship caused abundance of our men to
bid adieu to the world ... it was a fatigue for the
Devil." Gibraltar, taken by us in 1704, was a hotbed
of sickness ; in 171 1 the men there were obliged to
burn their huts for fuel. In 1705 there was a serious
outbreak of horse sickness in the Duke's own camp —
distemper, his chaplain calls it — and it spread to the
enemy's cavalry also. Recruiting was always extra-
ordinarily difficult ; criminals from the gaols were readily
accepted, though the worst men were always sent to
the more distant theatres of war, and the worst of all
to America. Parliament licensed impressment in the
case of persons unable to prove ' visible means of
subsistence.' By 1708 free pardon had to be offered to
all deserters who would rejoin the colours.
Yet out of materials of this nature the Duke made
the Armies that won Schellenberg, Blenheim, Ramillies,
Oudenarde and Malplaquet, Armies that were never de-
feated, that began and ended with the conviction that
Upon each pair of English legs
Did march three Frenchmen.
122 THE DUKE IN THE FIELD
During the war the British contingents, in all the
theatres of war together, rose to a total of 70,000 men
(1709) ; these were nearly always raised in new regi-
ments, for the Duke permitted no drafts ; a battalion
of those days would number about 900 x muskets, and
each battalion, except in the case of the Guards and
the Royal Scots, was a regiment in itself. A cavalry
regiment counted 450 sabres. When Eugene first saw
our cavalry he said, " Money, which you don't want
in England, will buy fine clothes, and horses, but
it cannot buy that lively air which I see in every
one of these troopers' faces." Marlborough's belief in
and love for Private Thomas Atkins has never been
exceeded by any commander, and Thomas entirely
reciprocated those feelings. The Duke's serenity in the
worst dangers, to which he constantly exposed himself
without ever getting a scratch, had something awful,
almost godlike, in it. ' He does not use to say much,
when he is chagrined, but nobody's countenance speaks
more,' and his men knew that he had a true and
tender heart for their sufferings. The result was that
he was able to require of his men marches and assaults
which his enemies deemed impossible. Always when
possible he started before dawn, and was in camp by
noon, providing carts for the sick to ride in. There
were no more arrears of pay, and almost no plunder, for
the Duke paid ready money for everything. Woe to the
fraudulent sutler or paymaster ; the Duke would speak
to him, and Cadogan would hang him. For the Cavalry
he perhaps cared most : there was to be no more firing
1 These figures must be understood to represent the strength
at the beginning of- a campaign only ; the ' wastage of war '
was enormous.
CAMPAIGNS OF 1702-3 123
from horseback, a practice which the French still used ;
Marlborough's horsemen charged at the gallop and used
cold steel only. For the first time there is an entirely
separate Artillery, as a scientific branch of the Service
(1702) ; there are also Engineers and ' Pontoniers ' to
make bridges ; at Blenheim, Lord Orkney notes with
astonishment that we actually made bridges over the
little stream in the very face of the enemy. In 1703 the
last pikes disappeared from the Infantry regiments, and
every soldier had a bayonet on his musket : all writers
testify to the excellent and accurate firing ' by platoons '
of the British troops.
But the reader, like the Duke, is impatient to find
the enemy and beat him. In the summer of 1702 the
French were in occupation of the whole Southern Nether-
lands and of all the fortresses in the Meuse valley, with
the exception of Mastricht. Marlborough's first task
being to deliver Holland from fear of invasion, he took
the field at Nimeguen in June, and drove Marshal
Boufflers and sixty thousand Frenchmen from their
posts on the lower Rhine and Waal back upon Brussels,
and in three months had retaken, practically without
loss, the great Meuse fortresses of Venloo, Stevenswaert,
Maseyk, Roermonde, Liege ; then the Dutch Com-
missioners compelled him to call a halt. In 1703 the
Elector of Bavaria, to whom King Louis presented a coat
with diamond buttons, value two million francs, de-
clared for France, and a great combination for a joint
French and Bavarian invasion of Austria via the Danube
was formed. Marshal Villeroy was meanwhile to recover
the line of the Meuse — if he could. But he couldn't,
and Marlborough captured Huy, and had thus got hold
of the whole triangle between Meuse and Rhine. That
124 CAMPAIGN OF 1704
was the year of the terrible storm of November 27th, in
which ten Queen's ships were lost, the first Eddystone
Lighthouse was destroyed, the banks of the Severn were
washed away, and even a Bishop and his wife were
killed by falling chimneys. In 1704, after consultation
with Eugene, Marlborough in the deepest secrecy planned
his great coup, which led to the victory of Blenheim.
With enormous difficulty he persuaded the Dutch to
allow him to undertake what he at first called ' defensive
operations on the Moselle,' and, a little later, ' measures
for the relief of the Emperor.' In May he was lying
about Mastricht, facing Villeroy, who lay with his front
to the East based on Brussels. The Bavarians were at
Ulm on the Danube waiting to be joined by Marshal
Tallard, who from Alsace held both banks of the Rhine ;
him old Ludwig of Baden watched, though with small
forces, from the Black Forest.
Now Marlborough knew that he might safely make a
feint at the heart of France via the Moselle, and that, if
he did, Villeroy must follow him, a contingency which
even the timid Dutchmen could not fail to foresee ;
Holland would thus be safe. Accordingly, in May, he
marched to Bonn and up the Rhine to Coblentz, where
the Moselle joins the Rhine. But then, to the astonish-
ment of friend and foe alike, the English Duke pushed
swiftly southwards by Mainz, struck the Neckar at
Ladenburg, and met Eugene and Ludwig at Mondelheim
in mid-June. Is he for Alsace ? thought the French.
Anyway Villeroy panted after him on the French side
of the Rhine. No, by Heaven, he is for the Danube !
On the 25th he was close to Ulm, and the Elector, in
his diamond-buttoned coat, hastened to entrench himself
on an almost impregnable ' kopje ' outside the town of
MARLBOROUGH ON THE DANUBE 125
Donauworth called the Schellenberg. It was a position
which had been attempted thirteen times in history,
but never carried except by the Swedes under Gustavus
Adolphus. On July 2nd it was stormed for the second
time, though with fearful loss to our men, and the
town and bridge of Donauworth were secured. After
that action, Prince Ludwig was pleased to say that
the English troops might be killed, but couldn't be
beaten. The Elector drew off, badly hit, to Augsburg,
and Marlborough crossed the Danube, got in his rear,
and ravaged all Bavaria to starve him out. Even
while he ravaged, he compelled the Bavarian brewers
to go on brewing large casks of their excellent beer for
his soldiers.
Meanwhile Tallard and Villeroy had met in the Black
Forest on the very day of the Schellenberg fight, and an
earnest message of the Elector had summoned all pos-
sible French troops to his assistance. Eugene with the
Austrians lay North of them at Stollhofen, but by the
end of July he and Marlborough were gradually drawing
nearer to each other and to the Danube. On August nth
the latter again crossed the river Northwards and joined
Eugene. Tallard and the Elector did the same and took
up on the 12th a very strong position on the North bank
at Blenheim. They were protected by several little
streams running down to the Danube, one of which was
over twelve feet wide, and the ground was extremely
marshy between these : on their right and left they held
and strengthened the villages of Blenheim and Lutzingen.
They therefore thought themselves safe either from a
frontal or a flank attack, and, as provisions were very
short in both camps, sat down to a starving match
against the Allies. But Marlborough had no intention
126 BATTLE OF BLENHEIM, 1704
of starving, and determined to risk a battle. The
numbers were fairly equal, something over 50,000 a
side, the Franco-Bavarians being, perhaps, 4,000 the
better. Early on the 13th Eugene on our right set out
to make a long detour against the Elector and Marshal
Marsin, who held Liitzingen ; and Lord Cutts on our
left, who was to try to storm Blenheim, waited to begin
his attack till about two, by which time it was hoped
Eugene would be successful. But Eugene was thrice
hurled back, and at three o'clock was barely holding
his own ; soon after that the Duke in person led the
flower of the English cavalry to a series of charges
over the streams and marshes in the centre, and he
used his guns and his infantry to support these charges
in a most masterly fashion. His final and triumphant
charge was at five o'clock, and then at last the French
left fell back before Eugene. But the twenty-seven
battalions and twelve squadrons of dragoons that
held Blenheim resisted all shocks of Cutts, Webb and
Orkney until the pursuit had swept past them and left
the village isolated. Then Lord Orkney pointed out to
these gallant fellows the hopelessness of their position,
" though to* tell the truth it was a little gasconade in
me"; in fact he confesses that he ' bluffed ' them into
surrender.
" Oh ! que dira le Roi, que dira le Roi ! " said the
French officers, as they laid down their arms. In killed,
wounded and prisoners, France had lost hard upon
40,000 men as well as 100 guns : our loss was about
12,000. There was little pursuit of the few who
escaped. Tallard was a prisoner ; the Elector fell back
to the Rhine. Marlborough turned North-Westwards,
crossed the Rhine at Stollhofen, and proceeded to
LORD PETERBOROUGH IN SPAIN 127
invest Landau and the Moselle fortresses of Trier and
Trarbach ; all three fell before the end of the year.
Blenheim was the greatest English victory on land since
Agincourt ; on September 7th there was a solemn
thanksgiving service in St. Paul's, and Sir Christopher
Wren built the Queen a throne in his new church
for the occasion. The Crown granted the Duke the
ancient royal manor of Woodstock, and he began to
rear in the park thereof the hideous structure which
still bears the name of Blenheim Palace. England had
other cause of rejoicing, for, a week before Blenheim,
Admiral Rooke, who had begun the war by failing to
take Cadiz, by sweeping up a Plate fleet and capturing
Vigo, seized the Rock of Gibraltar, and decisively re-
pulsed, off Malaga, a French Fleet that tried to recapture
it. These events had really assured to England the
active co-operation of her old ally, Portugal ; better still,
they led Englishmen to realize Blake's half-forgotten
view of the all-importance of the Mediterranean as a
basis for England's sea-power. The Rock successfully
resisted a most terrible siege in the winter of 1704-5.
The Emperor Leopold died in May, 1705, and was
succeeded by his son, Joseph I., elder brother of the
Archduke Charles, ' King of Spain,' for whom English
troops under Peterborough and Stanhope had now
captured Barcelona. All the North-Eastern corner of
the Spanish Peninsula, that is, Catalonia and Valencia,
always jealous of Castile, forthwith declared for Charles.
Peterborough was everywhere hindered by lack of
supplies and money, but he performed marvels with the
few troops he had, and won town after town by a series
of stratagems. In 1706, with the help of an English
Fleet, he relieved Barcelona, which had been besieged,
128 MARLBOROUGH'S CAMPAIGN OF 1705
while from the West another Army of Anglo-Portuguese,
under Lord Galway, drove before it Philip's general
Marshal Berwick (son of James II. by Marlborough's
sister !) and occupied Madrid. Now, said Peterborough,
was the time for Charles to advance from the Mediter-
ranean coasts and to join hands with Galway ; but
Charles was as slow as Peterborough was swift, and,
though the junction was at last effected in August,
Berwick had already been strongly reinforced from
France, had cut off the Allies from Madrid, and soon
drove Galway and Charles into Valencia. Peterborough
went off to Italy by himself, and was recalled to England
in the next year. He was an extraordinary man ; Queen
Mary, we remember, had thought him ' mad.'
Meanwhile Marlborough had intended to begin the
campaign of 1705 from his new conquests on the Moselle
and to drive at the heart of France, but when, after
wintering as an adored hero in England, he reached Trier
at the end of May, he found that none of his Allies were
ready, that Villeroy was preparing for active operations
on the Meuse, and that Holland was squealing for help.
He therefore marched upon the Meuse and crossed it,
Villeroy falling back behind fortified lines on the river
Geete. These lines, which had taken three years to
make, were a great feature in the French method of
warfare ; they extended in a great curve from Antwerp
to Namur, and within them now lay the French and
Bavarians with 70,000 men. Marlborough, however, by
a dexterous feint at Namur, drew off some of the best
French troops from the weakest point of the lines, which
was just at William's old field of Landen, and with
hardly any loss to himself, forced successively the passage
of the Mehaigne and the Geete, and drove Villeroy
RAMILLIES AND ITS RESULTS, 1706 129
behind the Dyle. There he was for the time stopped ;
" Dyle they say is Scotch for Devil," says his chaplain,
" and so this paltry river proved to us " ; though
Orkney was of opinion that an attempt to force that
passage also ought to have been made, " but," he
adds, " the Dutch are so untoward and my Lord so
pestered with them, that it is a wonder he doth not
leave the army." Unable to cross the Dyle, the Duke
was compelled to ascend to its source near Genappe,
from whence he turned towards Brussels, and was pre-
paring to attack Villeroy on the field of Waterloo,
when the Dutch again interposed their veto. But he
had at least levelled the whole of the fortified lines as
far North as Arschott.
In the next year, 1706, he was to attain a still greater
— perhaps his greatest — triumph. It was the year of
Ramillies and of his great march to the sea. Villeroy in
May lay behind that tiresome Dyle. Marlborough from
Mastricht sprang over the Geete and brought the French
to action at Ramillies on May 23rd. The feature of the
battle is the admirable skill with which the Duke, by
showing nearly all his red-coats on his right, induced
Villeroy to withdraw the flower of his own troops to
oppose them ; then hurled the Dutch on to the French
right, which was unsupported. Lord Orkney fumed and
fretted at his men being used only as a tactical pawn,
' though, indeed, I think I never had more shot about
my ears,' and at being kept wholly inactive. But
the British finished the battle, for they did all the
pursuit, and at last triumphantly forced the Dyle at
Louvain. Then, in a month of marvellous marches,
the Duke pressed on Westwards and Northwards,
and took successively Brussels, Mechlin, Alost, Ghent,
VOL. Ill Q
130 OPINION IN ENGLAND, 1707
Oudenarde, Antwerp. Before the end of the campaign
Ostend, Menin, Dendermond and Ath had also sur-
rendered, and English troops had penetrated into French
Flanders. The Netherlands were now almost clear,
except for the little corner on the line of the Sambre
where the enemy held Mons, Charleroi and Namur, and
for Ypres, which held out in the North- West.
Before the end of the year people in London were
beginning to talk of a Peace. The Estates of Brabant,
the most important political body in the Southern
Netherlands, had hastened to acknowledge Charles as
their sovereign ; and the old French King was not in-
disposed to give up his grandson's Spanish throne, if he
might be allowed to keep Milan, Naples and the Kingdom
of Sicily. Marlborough, however, was right in refusing
these offers. We must not forget that his eyes were
never off the Mediterranean, as we shall see when we
consider the events of 1707. To leave these provinces
to a Bourbon would make Italy a French dependency,
and the great inland sea a French lake. Eugene was now
making gallant head in Italy, and one of Marlborough's
ideas was to transport his own Army thither, and, in
conjunction with the English Fleet, finish the war at a
blow. But, of course, the Dutch would not hear of that.
Meanwhile the Duke's own position at home was
slowly becoming less comfortable. Duchess Sarah, the
Queen's dearest friend, was a most imperious and
tyrannical friend ; and the placid Queen was beginning
to resent her bursts of temper. Once a cry for peace is
raised at all in England, it is apt to become unreasonable ;
the factious Tories were taking advantage of it, and were
growing stronger in the Lower House, while, as I said
above, the Government was coming to wear a much
CAMPAIGN OF 1707 131
more Whiggish look ; and so the Tories were also crying
out ' Church in Danger ! ' Their favourite weapon was
a Bill against ' Occasional Conformity.' This has been
represented as an instance of their wicked intolerance ;
but, in truth, there is much hardship in expecting a
pious clergyman, who believes in the validity of the
Holy Sacrament, to give it to a Dissenter who avows
that he takes it only that he may hold political or
municipal office ; the Bill was repeatedly brought in,
but only passed in 171 1, and repealed by 1 George I.
Sarah, however, acting no doubt in accordance with her
husband's wishes, but wholly without his tact, bullied
the Queen into creating the Hanoverian Prince, after-
wards George II., a Peer of England, and, at the end
of the year, into making a most pernicious Whig, the
younger Sunderland, Secretary of State. The Duke
knew by this time that Harley and St. John were not
unlikely to play him false, if they could get thereby
the reins of government into their own hands.
In 1707 came the deliberate treachery of the Emperor
by a Treaty with Louis for neutrality in Italy ; this
unlocked another huge French Army for operations in
the Netherlands, and the result was that all that year
Marlborough had to sit at Louvain, which is about the
central point of his recent conquests, watching very
superior forces of the enemy concentrating on the
Sambre ; these, however, effected almost nothing. In
Spain, Galway and ' King ' Charles, who attempted a
fresh advance on Madrid, were smashed to pieces by
Berwick at Almanza, and compelled to fall back behind
the Ebro ; and, worse still, a great siege of Toulon,
undertaken by Eugene and the English Fleet under
Admiral Shovell, was beaten off by the gallantry of the
132 BATTLE OF OUDENARDE, 1708
French commander Tesse, after two months' leaguer,
with fearful loss. The French, however, had sunk their
Toulon Fleet to prevent its capture, and we were thus
left in undisputed command of the Mediterranean.
The year 1708 opened with a great increase of faction
in Parliament ; only on the maintenance of the Fleet
could both parties agree. There was already in existence
a ' Seamen's Registration Act ' of 1696, by which 30,000
merchant sailors received each a bounty of £2 a year,
on condition of joining the Navy if called upon, and
now a still better Act was passed, freeing any sailor
who served the necessary period of apprenticeship
for any trade in Great Britain, and directing that any
one refusing to serve should be rendered incapable of
earning his living as a boatman on the river Thames.
Marlborough and Eugene met at the Hague in April
to arrange for a blow on the Sambre, but the Allies were
even more dilatory than usual, and the French, under
the Duke of Vendome, were able to resume a rapid
offensive ; treachery had admitted parties of them to
the towns of Ghent and Bruges, and they were already
laying siege to the important post of Oudenarde on the
Scheldt, which commanded the English line of com-
munications with Ostend, when by an extraordinarily
swift march (fifty miles in sixty hours), our Duke threw
his whole Army between Vendome and France, July
nth, and crossed the Scheldt in the face of the enemy.
Late that evening our eighty thousand fell upon their
hundred thousand West of the town. Private Deane
of the Guards says, " We beat 'em from hedge to
hedge, from breastwork to breastwork . . . they having
secured themselves of strong ground, as they always
do, getting into villages and houses, and making every
SIEGE OF LILLE 133
quick-set hedge so that we cannot come at them."
He evidently thought it a mean thing to take cover ;
but even the superior intelligence of ' La Tulipe ' and
his fellows had to give way to the dogged valour of
men like Deane. Vendome was driven back with great
slaughter ; Marlborough at once pushed on into France
and began to besiege the great city of Lille. He had
desired to mask Lille and push on to Paris, but even
Eugene was against this. At Oudenarde had fought with
great valour, on the one side, under the name of the
' Chevalier de Saint-George,' the exiled King James III.,
and, on the other, a stumpy little man with goggle eyes
and a red face, whom we shall later call George II.
For the siege of Lille, all material had to be brought
from Brussels, Vendome watching from the North,
Berwick and the Elector of Bavaria from the South
and East ; both made incessant attacks on our convoys,
but these were always repulsed and neither Frenchman
dared to risk a general engagement. Once the Elector
drew the Duke himself away by a threat on Brussels,
but fled at his approach. This siege of Lille is perhaps
Marlborough's greatest feat, for Boufflers, who was
inside, showed the utmost resource and valour in de-
fence. " We were fatigued and bugbeared out of our
lives," says Deane ..." the Army was drownded out,
and what was not killed or drownded was spoiled by
their hellish inventions of throwing bombs, boiling pitch,
tar, oil, brimstone and such combustibles from the
outworks." Our loss had been perhaps 8,000 men,
but the town capitulated in October, and the citadel
early in December ; Ghent and Bruges quickly fell also.
On the day on which the news of the fall of Lille reached
London, came the still greater news of the capture of
134 TORY REACTION
Minorca by Stanhope and the English Fleet ; the Mediter-
ranean was thus made safe for English keels. The
importance of Minorca to us can hardly be overrated ;
it is right opposite Toulon, and much of our subse-
quent strategy centred round it. Lost in 1756, it was
restored to us in 1763 ; lost again in 1783, we retook
it in 1798, but finally surrendered it in 1802. Malta,
taken at the date of Nelson's supremacy in the Mediter-
ranean, was a very poor substitute for the larger island.
If we ever have to fight France and Spain again, we
must retake Minorca at all costs.
In other respects the Spanish theatre of the war was
barren of events in 1708-9, but in the following year
Stanhope and the Austrian Stahremberg penetrated from
Catalonia into Aragon, won a little victory at Almenara,
and pushed on to Madrid, from which, for the second
time, King Philip was driven. But there again want of
men and the universal hostility of the Castilian popu-
lation told heavily against us ; the Duke of Vendome
came down in great force, and compelled the Allies to
evacuate the Capital. Stanhope, on his retreat, made
a most gallant but unsuccessful defence at Brihuega,
and Stahremberg at Villa Viciosa. But it was too late,
and these two actions practically closed the Peninsular
campaign in favour of Philip.
The death of Anne's husband, Prince George, in
November, 1708, has been called a loss to Marlborough,
but as a matter of fact he had gone over to the Opposi-
tion before his death : the Duke was still able to force
on the Queen some more Whig Ministers, notably Somers,
Wharton and Orford, and to get Harley and St. John,
now manifestly hostile to him, dismissed ; but it was
his last political triumph ; the Whigs played what cards
NEGOTIATIONS WITH FRANCE 135
they held very badly, and Sarah became almost un-
bearable to her mistress. She had recently introduced,
as a Maid of Honour, a relative of her own, Mistress
Abigail Hill, and Abigail, though never loved as Sarah
had been, managed the gouty and miserable widow with
considerable tact. To her the Tory Opposition turned,
and blew, through her mouth, the Church-and-Tory
trumpet to any and every tune against the Duke, the
War, the Whigs and the Dissenters. The year '9 opened
with a terrible frost, which lasted into March — River
frozen above-bridge for weeks together, and London
holding fairs on its bosom. Louis was gravely consider-
ing peace, and Marlborough went as plenipotentiary to
the Hague, where the French King vainly offered him
an enormous bribe ; it was not, indeed, the Duke, but
his violent Whig colleagues and their still more violent
Allies who refused Louis' very reasonable offers, which
were to renounce all for which he had fought, and to
recognize the Austrian claimant to Spain. The English
Ministry insisted on adding the humiliating condition
that France should join her forces to ours in order to
expel from the Peninsula the grandson of the King of
France ! Marlborough himself wrote, " If I were the
King of France I would venture the loss of my country
sooner than consent to this." By June 7th all hope
for peace was over, and Louis, bankrupt in a ruined
kingdom, made a noble appeal to his people, which
was nobly answered ; the coarsest bread was selling
in Paris at 8d. the pound, and the general distress drove
starving men to take service in the Army. That Army
was put under Villars, the ablest French Marshal that
Marlborough ever encountered. He set himself to form
strong lines from Douai Northwards to the Lys, with
136 BATTLE OF MALPLAQUET, 1709
his centre at La Bassee. Unable to force these lines
by a frontal attack, Marlborough turned upon Tournai,
which he took in July, after a terrible siege, and then
upon Mons. For the defence of this all-important for-
tress Villars was obliged to move out, and he took up
an almost impregnable position in a gap between
woods at Malplaquet.
The Duke was for attacking him before he had
strengthened this post, but, in deference to Eugene,
waited two days (till September nth) for reinforce-
ments, a delay which cost the Allies dear. Malplaquet
was the most terrible of battles, an assault on a narrow
front between woods and through woods ; men fought
from tree to tree, muzzles touching ; " I don't believe,"
says Lord Orkney, " ever Army in the world was
attacked in such a post . . . they had in many places
three, four and five retrenchments [entrenchments] one
behind the other . . . some of my foot ran away,
though I gave both fair and foul language. ... I
hope in God," says the hardened old Scot, " it will
be the last battle I ever see ; a very few of such
would make both parties end the war very soon."
" We," says Serjeant Hall, " had an indifferent breakfast,
but the Mounseers never had such a dinner in all their
lives ... we have lost two hundred in our battalion and
ten Serjeants, and I have received a very bad shot in the
head myself." As a matter of fact the victorious Allies
lost twenty thousand to the French twelve thousand ;
the Armies had been nearly equal, almost a hundred
thousand a side. Villars and Eugene were both wounded,
and the French retreat was conducted by Boufflers. The
Duke of Argyll had seven shots through his clothes.
But the result of the battle was the fall of Mons.
DR. SACHEVERELL 137
After this awful slaughter the English people began
indeed to say ' Cui bono ? ' Where is it all to end ?
The gallant attitude of the old French King, once the
bogy and bugbear of every Protestant child in England,
began to rouse respect : the plaguey Dutch, who were
everlastingly crying out for a strong ' Barrier ' to be
won for themselves against France, were thought to be
leading us by the nose. Louis' offers of the spring
began to be talked about, and the monstrous conditions
which the Whigs had wished to impose upon him
leaked out. Not slow were the Tories to take advan-
tage of such talk, and to add to it the most gratuitous
and insolent insinuations against the greatest of English
soldiers. ' He was prolonging the war for his own
glory — nay, for his own profit. He had refused bribes
from Louis ? Yes, but he had been far more heavily
bribed by the Emperor. He was an arch-peculator who
cheated poor soldiers of their pay,' etc., etc. — a string
of malicious lies. In such conditions of public feeling
a certain Dr. Sacheverell, who, I am sorry to say, was
a Fellow of Magdalen, ' an insolent, hot-headed man
without learning or piety,' preached on November 5th
before the Lord Mayor a vulgar, tawdry sermon, ' as
regardless of grammar as of sense,' denouncing tolera-
tion for Dissenters, and supporting the old Caroline
doctrine of right divine and non-resistance. To im-
peach such an ass was ridiculous, and the wisest Whigs,
especially Somers and Marlborough, protested against it. 1
But Godolphin, to whom the Doctor had appended an
1 There is, however, something to be said for the view, after-
wards expressed by Burke, that Sacheverell's sermon had been
deliberately intended as a challenge and that no Government
could have wholly overlooked it.
138 MARLBOROUGH'S LAST CAMPAIGN, 1710-11
ugly nickname, appears to have lost his head, and the
Ministry determined to bring on a trial. Wren built
a scaffold in Westminster Hall to accommodate five
hundred persons, and the mob of London went mad
over ' High Church and Sacheverell ' ; forty thousand
copies of the famous sermon were sold. It was the sort
of foolish outburst that was seen in our own days over
the removal of an African elephant from the Zoological
Gardens to America. On trial, the poor parson pre-
varicated and endeavoured to prove that he had never
meant what he had said ; the Lords merely ordered his
sermon to be burned and suspended him from preach-
ing for three years, and the foolish Queen rewarded
him with a rich living. On the accession of George he
vapoured a bit and talked about martyrdom, although
he took the oaths before his death in 1724.
But he had served the factious purpose of the Tories
admirably — he was just a stick to beat Whigs with :
" The Nation," wrote Luttrell a year later, " has cause
to curse Sacheverell ; without that hurly-burly you had
had peace ere now." On peace, indeed, the Tories were
determined, but only as a means of getting into office and
taking vengeance on the Whigs. Two more campaigns
were granted to the Duke : in 1710 he forced Villars'
lines of La Bassee, took Douai, Aire and Saint- Venant,
and in 171 1 forced a fresh and far more elaborate set of
lines, which the indomitable Marshal had created further
South, capturing Bouchain and menacing Arras and
Cambrai. Meanwhile the Queen had been interfering
badly with Marlborough's appointments in the Service ;
her last stormy interview with his wife was in April, '10,
while fresh peace-conferences were being carried on at
Gertruydenberg. There Louis renewed his offers of the
A TORY MINISTRY, 1710 139
year before, and even offered to cede Alsace to the Duke
of Lorraine, but, as before, utterly refused to help in
the expulsion of his grandson, who was now in solid
and triumphant possession of all Spain except the little
corner of Catalonia. Louis had indeed but to bide his
time and foster the factious spirit in England ; he
never needed to make such good offers again. The Whig
Sunderland was dismissed in June and Godolphin in
August, Rochester and Ormond (the latter almost an
avowed Jacobite), entered the Ministry, and finally
Harley became Lord Treasurer and St. John Secretary of
State. The remaining Whigs were cleared out by the
end of 17 10, and the ' Sacheverell election ' of that year
resulted in a huge Tory majority in the Commons, a
majority whose leaders used to meet in the celebrated
1 October Club ' at the Bell Tavern in Westminster.
Harley, St. John, Lord Chancellor Harcourt and Dr.
Jonathan Swift, who had begun in 1710 to write on
the Tory side in the Examiner, were virtually the
Ministry ; they used to meet and dine together, and no
doubt Swift, proudest of mankind, liked being called
' Jonathan ' and flattered by Ministers of State. But
it is astonishing that a man of his lofty intellect did
not see through the factious trivialities of Harley and
the more open knavery of St. John ; indeed there
is evidence that before the end of the reign he was
weary of his position. Both the leading Ministers
sprang from bitter Whig and Dissenting families ;
St. John in his youth had been compelled to read
every one of the hundred and nineteen sermons of
Dr. Manton on the hundred and nineteenth Psalm. He
was a man without honour or religion, a profligate of
unexampled recklessness, but capable, by fits and starts,
i 4 o St. JOHN AND HARLEY
of extraordinary industry. " Ah, Harry," said his father
in 1713, " I always said you would be hanged, but, now
you are made a Peer, I suppose you'll be beheaded."
It was a repulsive spectacle to see such a man posing
as a champion of the Church and a persecutor of
Dissenters. There may be something to be said for the
Occasional Conformity Act, and more for the Stamp Act
of 1712, which, with the laudable intention of cutting
down the * yellow press ' of those days, imposed a duty
on newspapers ; but there is nothing but condemnation
for St. John's Schism Act of 1714, by which no one
was to be allowed to keep a school without a licence
from the Bishop and the annual taking of the Anglican
Sacrament ; this, like its sister Act against Occasional
Conformity, was repealed by the Whigs, 1 George I.
Harley had risen by patient mastery of all the forms
of Parliament ; he could speak at any hour, at any
length, on any subject, and what he spoke, except
when he was making personal insinuations against an
opponent, was mere gas. He was a solemn windbag,
without the remotest idea of statesmanship, and, when
he got into the Office for which he had so basely
intrigued, he soon realized that he was merely drifting.
Though a heavy drinker he had one virtue in private
life, for he was a great collector of rare books and
manuscripts. He was created Earl of Oxford and Earl
Mortimer in May, 1711. For the last time in history
a Government office, the Privy Seal, was given to a
Bishop, Dr. Robinson.
From the first moment of its accession the Ministry
set itself to work for a Peace ; secret agents from France
were secretly received by the Queen ; to the Allies and
to Marlborough were shown bogus sketches of Treaties,
'PEACE AT ANY PRICE' 141
and meanwhile death had been busy on both sides abroad.
In February, 171 1, died the Dauphin ; in 1712 his eldest
son the Duke of Burgundy, and one of Burgundy's infant
sons. When, in 1714, Burgundy's youngest brother, Berri,
followed these to the grave, between Philip, King of
Spain, and the French Crown there now only remained a
frail infant, afterwards Louis XV., and his great-grand-
father, aged seventy-four. If the infant died, Philip would
unite the Spanish and French thrones, for no one supposed
for a moment that his renunciation of the latter, sworn
in 1700 on any number of Gospels, would be allowed
to stand in the way of his interests ; and then all our
blood and treasure would have been poured out for
nothing. But in April, 171 1, had died also the Emperor
Joseph, and he had left no sons ; * King ' Charles of
Spain was therefore now heir to all the Austrian do-
minions, and was chosen Emperor. If the chance of
the union of France and Spain were the more terrible,
the certainty of the re-creation of the Monarchy of
Charles V., if this other Charles really became King of
Spain, was hardly less terrible ; and we must remember
that Joseph died nearly a year before the two younger
French Princes. Thus fortune had again played into
the hands of the Tories.
When Marlborough reached the Hague after his cam-
paign of 1711 he was accused of peculation and dis-
missed from all his offices. Ormond was put in his
place, and was obliged at first to pretend to take the
field beside Eugene, but with secret orders to thwart
his ally, who had visited England early in '12 to protest
against the coming Peace, the Ministers in vain trying
to stir up the London mob against such a hero. In
July, 1712, Ormond was ordered to suspend hostilities
142 PEACE OF UTRECHT, 1713
and to march away his troops, who broke out into
mutiny and tears of rage at the news ; the foreign con-
tingents which had been in English pay positively refused
to quit Eugene, but, as a result of the English with-
drawal, Villars was able to resume the offensive, to beat
Eugene at Denain on July 24th, and to recapture several
frontier towns. Marlborough had already left England
in disgrace, but had been received with royal honours
by those very Dutch who had bullied and thwarted him
so much in the days of his glory. Of him there is little
more to tell. Sulky George when he came to the throne
gave him no confidence, though he was obliged to
restore him to the Command-in-Chief. The Duke had
two successive strokes of paralysis in '16, but he was
able to play with his grandchildren and to count his
guineas till '22, when a third stroke killed him.
The final congress for peace was opened at Utrecht
at the beginning of '13, and the Peace was signed on
March 31st ; it was a party peace, and St. John, now
Viscount Bolingbroke, frankly said so. It was brought
about purely as a party measure and by the most dis-
graceful means ; but, after such victories, it couldn't
help being of solid and splendid advantage to England.
And it expressed our position all the more because our
one naval ally, Holland, had no colonial or maritime
gains by it at all. She was, indeed, ceasing to be a
first-class Naval Power, and, for several years past, had
been unable to furnish her full contingent of ships. By
the terms of the Treaty (1) France and Spain recognize
the Hanoverian family as successors to Queen Anne.
(2) Philip, King of Spain, renounces all claims to the
French throne. (3) France agrees to claim no com-
mercial advantages in Spanish America, and Great
PEACE OF UTRECHT, 1713 143
Britain is to be allowed a thirty years' monopoly of the
importation of negro slaves to that country ; she is
also to be allowed to send one ship to the annual fair
of Portobello, which is the great depot of Spanish-
American trade on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of
Panama. (4) Spain cedes Gibraltar and Minorca to
Great Britain, and France cedes Acadia (afterwards
Nova Scotia) and Newfoundland ' to the same ; Spain
cedes the island of Sicily to Savoy. (5) France will
dismantle the fortifications of Dunkirk. (6) King
James III. shall quit France ; as early as 1709 Louis
had been obliged to tell him that such a contingency
was possible, but had promised that, wherever he went,
he, Louis, would support him ; James went at first
to Lorraine, and was there when Sister Anne died. (7)
In return for this abandonment of the Jacobite cause,
England will abandon her Spanish allies in the province
of Catalonia — result, the Catalans resisted Philip to the
death and their province was wasted in blood and fire.
(8) By a separate Treaty between France and the Dutch,
the Spanish Netherlands shall pass to the House of
Austria, but the Dutch shall be allowed to garrison a
long row of fortresses on the Southern frontier of these
provinces, and the Austrians shall contribute to the
pay of these garrisons ; this is the famous ' Barrier
Treaty.' England undertakes to support this Barrier
with a Fleet and an Army of ten thousand men ; the
Dutch, on their side, agree to support the Protestant
Succession in England with a Fleet and six thousand men.
1 On Newfoundland and the respective rights of France and
England there, see above, Vol. II., p. 513. On Acadia and Nova
Scotia and the respective meanings of these names at different
epochs, see Poole's ' Historical Atlas,' plates 85 and 86.
144 THE FREE TRADE CLAUSES
The Dutch are also permitted to close the river Scheldt,
upon which the commercial life of the Spanish Nether-
lands had depended, and so to ruin the port of Antwerp ;
this was, however, in the letter, merely a restatement of
one of the clauses of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
(9) And by a third Treaty, to which the Emperor at
last unwillingly agreed, Austria shall receive, in addition
to the said Netherland provinces, Naples, Milan and
Sardinia.
The original aim of King William III. was thus in
some sort obtained. A French Prince sat indeed upon
the throne of Spain and nominally ruled over the vast
regions of Spanish America ; but the Inheritance of
Charles V. was partitioned, and all its Mediterranean
power at an end. On these Treaties the political equili-
brium of Europe rested, or was believed to rest, for the
ensuing thirty years — some people say for eighty years —
and all the troubles of the next period arose from the
ambitious desire of several Powers, who thought it had
been too unfavourable to them, to upset it.
The best clause of all in the Treaty between England
and France was thrown out by the pestilent stupidity
of the British Parliament. St. John has only one title
to real fame ; he was, as many of his Tory associates
also were, a free trader, and he had drawn up a clause
by which England and France, immeasurably the two
most civilized nations of the world, were to stand, as
regards tariffs, ' on a footing each to each of the most
favoured nation ' : that is to say that France was to
admit goods produced in England, and England to
admit goods produced in France at lower duties than
those respectively enforced against the goods of all other
nations. But in 1703 Mr. Methuen had negotiated a
THE ENGLISH SUCCESSION 145
similar Treaty with Portugal, and, as Portugal had gold
(from Brazil) as well as wines to send us, the British
merchants, who still thought gold and silver the only
real ' wealth,' got the Lower House to reject, though
only by nine votes, the Commercial Treaty with France
in favour of that with Portugal. The result was that,
instead of drinking honest claret, our ancestors went
on for a century poisoning themselves with port, and
deserved (and got) the gout which they bequeathed
to their descendants.
The remainder of Anne's reign is concerned with the
question — What did her Ministers intend to do on her
death ? The rightful King of England had already left
France for Lorraine when Utrecht was signed. Nothing
in the Queen's own public conduct manifested much
Jacobite leaning ; but the fact that Ormond, Wynd-
ham, Mar held high office in the State looked in that
direction. The Tories, strong before, were still more
strengthened by the elections of 1713, and the Funds,
always at that date of Whig temper, had fallen at the
news ; they fell still further when Anne was taken very
ill in the following spring. In May, '14, the Lords carried
an Address to the Queen that she should demand the
expulsion of her brother from Lorraine, and even issue
a reward for his apprehension ; she was naturally furious,
and still more so when they demanded that Prince
George, who had been created Duke of Cambridge in
1706, should be sent for to sit in Parliament. The writ
was sent to him, but the Queen sent with it such a letter
as killed his grandmother, Sophia, the Hanoverian
claimant, aged eighty-three (June 8th) ; this left George
Lewis, Elector of Hanover, the parliamentary heir.
The fact is that during all the early part of Anne's reign
vol. in 10
146 THE ENGLISH SUCCESSION
the Hanoverian envoy, Baron Schutz, who had resided
twenty years in England, had managed his mistress's
cause with admirable tact ; but he had died in 1710,
and his successor, Bothmar, did not make himself so
acceptable. Phlegmatic George had long ago deposited
in a sealed paper with his Minister in England a list of
the Council of Regency, which, immediately on Anne's
death, was to proclaim his mother, or, if she died, him-
self ; and all the plans of his party were ready and
well laid. But the Tories had the actual power, both
civil and military, in their hands, and the whole ques-
tion was, — Were the Tories for James or for George ?
The answer must emphatically be, the Tories themselves
didn't know. Oxford certainly didn't know : he as-
sumed an air of mystery, and let each side think he was
devoted to it ; probably he was in a fright. The Church-
men didn't know : one Bishop, Atterbury of Rochester,
an eager, clever but not very tactful man, was an honest
Jacobite. The majority of the country Clergy hated
Dissenters so badly that they had almost forgotten their
fear of Popery, and perhaps a majority of the country
gentlemen thought upon the same lines ; indeed the
very least symptom on good King James' part of con-
cession on the religious question would undoubtedly have
brought him in, but this he was too honest a man to
show. He let every one know that he was absolutely
without intolerance, and that, while keeping his own
faith, he would protect ours all over the World ; only,
unfortunately, no one believed that Papists ever spoke
the truth. Marshal Berwick, James' half-brother but
now a naturalized French subject, had a plan which,
though adventurous, had something to recommend it ;
it was that James should travel secretly to England,
KING JAMES OR KING GEORGE? 147
seek in secret a reconciliation with his sister, and get
her to present him to Parliament as her heir. This
would, I think, very possibly have succeeded. The
glorious scenes at the close of Mr. Thackeray's master-
piece ' Esmond ' represent the temper of the time with
astonishing fidelity, and err only in the ludicrously un-
fair character they give of the exiled King. With the
Whigs were, of course, all the Dissenters, now a very
rich and powerful body, and most of the financiers,
merchants and manufacturers ; to us, accustomed to
the cruel supremacy of the urban over the rural classes,
this sounds an overwhelming combination, but in 1714
it did not mean a quarter of the Nation.
In those fateful months the question seemed to rest
on the fulcrum of an even balance. Some have thought
that it rested in the hands of Henry St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke. That astute schemer was certain to be
cast down from his high position if George came in ;
whereas, if James became King, he might possibly last
some time before James found out what a scoundrel he
was. And so in July, '14, he undoubtedly leaned to
the Jacobites : he tripped up his colleague, Oxford, and
got him dismissed at the end of that month ; and, in
after years, it was believed that he had said that ' with
six weeks more of Queen Anne, he would have had the
Stuarts back again.' But poor Anne, whatever her own
feelings may have been, couldn't give her new Minister
even a week : on the 30th she had a fit of apoplexy,
and the Whig Dukes of Argyll and Somerset hastened
to Kensington, forced themselves into the Cabinet, and
insisted on speaking to their dying Sovereign. At the
bedside they compelled her, at 1 p.m., to give the White
Staff of Lord Treasurer to the Duke of Shrewsbury,
148 DEATH OF ANNE, 1714
whom, though once a Jacobite, they believed they now
could trust. According to one version, Bolingbroke
himself proposed Shrewsbury ; if so, did he believe him
to be a Hanoverian ? The Dukes went back to the
Council Chamber and sat all afternoon and night, 30th,
and all 31st, drafting orders to troops and officials in
the interest of King George. The Queen lingered un-
conscious, and died at 7 a.m. on August 1st. " What
a World is this, and how does Fortune banter us ! "
CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF W(H)IGS
The period now before us is typified by its headdress,
and influenced by the fact that men had worn that
headdress for at least a generation. Although, except
for full dress, wigs were actually growing smaller during
the reigns of George I. and II., the moral influence of the
wig may be said to have reached its zenith in the former
reign ; and, while it lasted, I think it must have stupefied
mankind.
Yet the age should not be dismissed as wholly
stupid, wholly immoral or wholly unkindly. The tattle
of fashionable wits is not to be taken as giving a fair
picture of the intelligence or the morality of the Nation ;
on the whole I believe private morality to have been
steadily getting better. But the tone set by the Court
was very low, and was unrelieved by any such intel-
lectual graces and interests as had partly redeemed
the age of Charles II. If England was not without
great men, it was without great causes. * No enthu-
siasm ' was its watchword, and the word was used in its
strictly Greek sense. The moral influence of the Church
was by no means so dead as has been alleged ; the
country parsons as a whole did their duty ; but, among
the higher Clergy, the most spiritual element had passed
to the Non- Jurors, or accommodated itself with difficulty
149
150 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPIRIT
to the service of a Whig Government. That Govern-
ment naturally appointed Whig Bishops, and these seem
to have been largely inoculated with the spirit of
scepticism. A great literature grew up of a ' Deistic '
kind, challenging and attempting to explain away all
the mysterious and spiritual side of religion, reducing
Christianity, in short, to a system of prudence, and
calling in doubt everything that cannot be ' naturally
explained.' On the other hand, spiritual truth was
never more admirably defended than by Bishops
Berkeley and Butler, the intellectual giants of their
century ; the great glory of the latter is to have
proved that the laws of Nature are as mysterious as
those of revealed religion. And on the same side we have
the mystic and Non-Juror, William Law, whose ' Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life ' was the most treasured
possession of our great-grandmothers ; on the same side,
too, the simple piety of the Quakers, whose worldly
prosperity was also very great. To Law and to the
Quakers we shall, before the middle of the century,
be able to affiliate the new spiritual movement of
the ' Methodists.' Again, George II. 's Queen, Caroline,
though she had no religion to speak of, did her best
to promote learning in the Church ; both Butler and
Berkeley were her nominees to bishoprics.
But, when we turn to the sphere of government, we
shall see that ' politics ' have reached a very serious depth
of degradation ; that they are becoming what they are
believed to be to-day, merely the art of ' managing '
the Houses of Parliament and the electorate ; and,
as we should expect, this is accompanied by an utter
neglect of the Army, Navy and coast defences. All the
lessons of Marlborough are forgotten, all posts in both
KING GEORGE I. 151
the Services are at the mercy of the parliamentary jobber
who is for the moment on the top, or of intrigues at the
Court. Statesmanship withers in such an atmosphere ;
the one contemporary British statesman of great ideas,
John, Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, failed
to lead his country simply because he could not bring
himself to soil his hands by managing the House of
Commons.
George I. was born in the Restoration year, and was
thus fifty-four when he became King ; he possessed the
rare virtue of truthfulness, and had fought with dis-
tinction against the Turks. He had married his own
cousin, accused her, rightly or wrongly, 1 of adultery, and
shut her up in a dismal German castle for thirty-one
years. He kept two mistresses (whom he created English
Peeresses), more perhaps because it was ' the thing,'
in the little German Courts in which all his thoughts
were centred, to imitate Louis XIV., than from any
natural tendency to wickedness. Nominally a Lutheran,
he was quite ready to conform to the English, or to any
other outward form of religion, but at heart he was a cold
materialist. We have Sir Robert Walpole's authority
for saying that he could be good company after dinner ;
but, as Walpole knew no French or German and the
King no English, and as both were thus reduced to con-
verse in bad Latin, their jollity must have been under
some restraints. George showed little enthusiasm for
his new kingdom, which, as the French Ambassador
said, he probably considered ' as a temporary possession
to be made the most of while it lasted.' As for his
manners, ' when he has a mind to compliment any one
he bites a piece of sweetmeat with his gums (for he has
1 The latest investigations, we fear, prove that it was ' rightly.'
152 GEORGE, PRINCE OF WALES
no teeth), and then gives the rest to the person he desires
to oblige.' Few kings have been more hated by high
and low, and the hatred was pretty openly expressed,
although I believe that the clergyman who, preaching
on the anniversary of his accession, chose for his text,
' Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' was an
Irishman, unconscious of his own wit. In George's last
year his statue in the new ' Grosvenor Square ' (begun
in 1 716) was pulled down and smashed to bits, nor
could the smashers ever be discovered. No wonder
that his greatest pleasure was in his periodical visits
to Hanover, that ' Terra Damnosa '
For which he scrapes, borrows, begs all he can get,
And runs his poor owners most vilely in debt.
His two children, the Queen of Prussia and George, Prince
of Wales, were different from their father ; the latter
at least was such a warm partisan of his unfortunate
mother that his father hated him bitterly, and once
gravely listened to a proposal to have him kidnapped
and deported to the backwoods of America. The Prince
was as brave as his father, but without his father's
shrewdness or self-restraint, the vainest little strutting
peacock of a man you can conceive. He made, just
because his father scorned England, a parade of ap-
pearing intensely English ; he rapidly learned to speak
English of the Billingsgate variety, and sought vigorously
for English mistresses. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
the occasional head of such society as the disgusting
Court could collect, says of him that ' he looked upon
all men and women as creatures he might kick or kiss
for his diversion.' But he was saved from the intense
hatred felt for his father by the tact of his wonderful
LITERATURE AND POLITICS 153
wife Caroline, of whom more anon. Both father and
son were, as far as education went, simple boors, blind
to everything that can elevate the mind, to religion,
romance, art, letters or science. 1 And if in their reigns
Pope was rising to immortal fame, if Defoe and Swift
were weaving incantations for posterity, if Johnson and
Fielding reached their maturity, it must be allowed that
the general tone of literature was very low. It was
the day of ' Grub Street/ of ' Secret History,' of forged
memoirs. The bitterness of authors against each other
and against their publishers — a harmless and often a
beneficent race of men — is very startling. Colley Cibber
was a fit Poet Laureate for such a period. The Theatre
did not improve in morality ; masquerades at the Opera
House, continually denounced from the pulpit, were
openly patronized by both Kings, and the first Panto-
mimes, which date from 1723, were very indecent.
It is customary for historians to pay much attention
to the parliamentary and ministerial history of this
period, and to the shifting kaleidoscope of European
Treaties ; personally, I do not much care which par-
ticular Whig was uppermost at any given date ; the
essential thing is to know what sort of man an Eighteenth
Century Whig was, and how he governed England.
George I. made no attempt to govern it ; he gave up
sitting in his Privy Council, and left affairs to a small
knot of men who were called ' his servants,' and whom
we now call ' The Cabinet.' The result was that George II.,
who wanted to govern, was thwarted almost every time
he tried ; though no doubt the personal preferences
of the Kings, or still more often their personal hatreds,
1 An exception must, however, be made at least in the son's
case ; he could appreciate and patronize the music of Handel.
154 WHIGGERY TRIUMPHANT
had always to be noticed by the real governors. Both
Kings also exercised some influence on the Army, and
occasionally made good appointments in it ; George II.
had a truly German passion for designing uniforms. In
Hanover, of course, both were absolute sovereigns.
Says Carteret to George II., in the ballad (1742),
Then cock your great hat, strut and bounce and look bluff,
For, though kicked and cuffed here, you shall there kick and cuff ;
and George answers —
you shall do
Whatever you like ; give me troops to review !
The Tories being defeated, and more than half
legitimists at heart, the Cabinets consisted entirely of
Whigs, and the triumphant Whigs at once grasped
the principle (since too often thought to be the main-
spring of parliamentary life) of ' government by party.'
Of this the first rule was now laid down — no Tory
shall hold any office ; to the victors the spoils. But,
as there were not spoils enough for all the victors, there
soon appeared several successive schisms in the Whig
camp, and a * Whig out of place ' was almost obliged
to join the Tories in baiting the ' Whigs in place.' Place,
Office, a job, was what each sought, and the Great Council
of the Empire became mainly an avenue for greedy men
towards lucrative jobs. The patronage at the disposal
of a Minister was enormous, and was mainly bestowed
in return for votes given in his support in Parliament
or at elections. Capable officers were dismissed from
regiments because they, or some friend of theirs, had
voted against the Minister. This sort of thing, and not
direct bribery, is what is meant by ' Parliamentary
corruption.' One thing that made it easy was that a
PARLIAMENTARY CORRUPTION 155
large number of seats in the Commons were at the
disposal of a few rich men, who controlled the votes
of the few electors in many boroughs ; thus we speak
of the Duke of Newcastle ' owning ' the borough of
Aldborough, and so on. If the Prime Minister can buy
the rich Mr. Blank, by making him Lord Tomnoddy ;
making him a Commissioner of the Tape-and-Sealing-wax
Office ; giving him a contract to make army breeches ;
decorating him with the riband of an Order ; making
his brother a Bishop, his wife a Lady-in- Waiting, or his
cousin Governor of Coventry Island, he will be able
to buy with him the votes given in the Lower House
by the honourable members for Eatanswill, Bishop's
Cheetham, Rogueingrain and East and West Smuggleton,
which boroughs do not contain twenty ' free and in-
dependent electors ' apiece. He can, in fact, by such
means purchase a majority in Parliament which may
outlast many general elections, without spending a
penny of his own money and with little expenditure of
the Nation's. The worst of it is that a Nation so easily
gets used to this kind of thing ; the tape and the sealing
wax supplied by the new Commissioner are perhaps a
little worse, the army breeches rather more shoddy,
than when a creature of the last Government supplied
them, but open ' scandals ' are rare.
I do not for a moment suggest that the Georgian Whigs
began this method of government ; if any one Minister
began it, it was the Tory Danby ; it was the Tory Ministry
of Harley that first ruthlessly excluded every Whig from
office ; and that unblushing liar Bolingbroke, who spent
his old age in denouncing Party and writing treatises
for a * Patriot King who should abolish Party Govern-
ment,' had been the fiercest Tory partisan while in, and
156 PARLIAMENTARY CORRUPTION
the most shameless Leader of Opposition while out of
Office. But I think the Georgian Whigs were the first
who erected Party into a system, and claimed that it
was inseparable from our form of free government ; and
the astounding thing is that one of the greatest of philo-
sophers, Edmund Burke, treated this idea as an axiom.
We have gone on believing it ever since. Nowadays,
of course, when Mr. Blank no longer nominates the
member for Rogueingrain, and when there are more
electors in the borough of Eatanswill than there were in
broad Scotland, regnante Georgio I., you, in order to keep
your party in office, don't bribe Mr. Blank ; but you
do something much more disastrous in its consequences ;
you bribe the electors themselves by appealing directly
to their pockets or their fads, at the expense of the
pockets or the fads of some other class of men — e.g., you
want to win an election in a borough where you are told
there are a group of fools who object to vaccinating
their children, and so, in order to bribe that borough,
you risk the health of Great Britain and bring in a Bill
to make vaccination optional ; or again, in order to win
the votes of the improvident classes all over England,
you pass an Act to give every one a pension of five shillings
a week at the age of seventy. From your own point of
view you are absolutely right ; such a gift as this will
probably keep you and your kind in office indefinitely,
or until the other party outbids you by promising to
raise the pension to ten shillings. But what about
Diva Britannia ? What will she say when she gets
hold of you, as she will some day ? Eighteenth Century
Ministers were at least spared that sort of degradation ;
indeed, one of their great merits is that they legislated
so little.
LIMITATIONS TO WHIGGERY 157
But to recur to our Whig of the Age of Wigs ; he was
for King George as against King James mainly because
he knew that King James would turn him and his col-
leagues out of office, and so he was able to pose to himself
as a representative of the principles of the ' Glorious
Revolution ' of 1688, now rapidly crystallizing into a
legend. This also meant that he was a supporter of
Parliamentary Government as against Royal Govern-
ment. And so far he was right, in that government by
the British aristocracy, even of that day, was likely
to be a good deal better than the personal government
of George or James would have been. He was also
supposed to be anti-French, and a strong protectionist,
and to rely on ' the City ' rather than on the country
gentlemen. He ate several of these principles, and was,
I think, prepared to eat more, in obedience to the dic-
tates of Party Government. But there were limits to
his partisanship : if the honour of Britain were too
deeply wounded, the national defence too scandalously
neglected, if the trade of Britain were seriously crippled,
his compliance with the guilty Minister would break off
short ; and, though there were many individual in-
stances of genuinely unpatriotic factiousness, it was not
till the French Revolution had instilled its poison into
Europe that it became a settled policy of one whole
Party to hamper the other in its defence of national
existence and honour.
This reflection leads us to consider for a moment the
position of Great Britain on the map of Europe. In
spite of the Peace of Utrecht, her rivalry with France
remained the greatest factor in European politics, a
rivalry due to past history and to new commercial
jealousy ; a rivalry in North America, in the West
158 FOREIGN POLITICS, 1714-30
Indies, in the East Indies, in the Mediterranean,
above all in Belgium. But, for twenty-five years after
the death of Louis XIV., France was not in a position
to make this rivalry effective. She had been very
hard hit by the late war. The throne of her young
and delicate King, Louis XV., was coveted by his
uncle Philip of Spain. It therefore suited successive
French Ministers, especially the pacific Cardinal Fleury
(1726-43), to keep on the best possible terms with George,
and to maintain the recent settlement of Utrecht. To
maintain this settlement, which gave such an opening
for British commerce, was also the greatest desire of
successive British Ministries ; and the chief difficulty in
maintaining it lay, for each Great Power, in the task
of keeping its Allies quiet. Now alliances after Utrecht
should naturally have lain as they had lain before it, i.e.,
England, Austria and Holland against France and Spain.
But the tie that bound each client to its patron was
of the loosest, and was liable to snap at any moment.
Perhaps the situation can be best explained by a
parable. There are two dogmasters, England and
France. Each owns a quarrelsome dog. The dogs
have been fighting for a rich plate of bones (the
old Spanish Monarchy), and each master has helped
his own dog. In 1713 the masters, grown weary,
have agreed to divide the food between the dogs ;
they have left the richest part to the Spanish dog,
Philip, but have detached some juicy morsels, called
Naples, Sardinia, Milan, Belgium for the Austrian dog
Charles. The English dogmaster has not been above
picking a bone or two (Minorca, Gibraltar, the trade
with Spanish America) for himself. It is the dogs, not
the masters, who are discontented at the Peace and the
FRANCE, SPAIN AND AUSTRIA 159
allotment ; they are still straining at their chains and
barking furiously. The peace of Dame Europa's yard
is not improved by the fact that two sturdy little un-
owned puppies, called Prussia and Savoy, are frisking
about in it, ready to snap up anything they can get ;
two quite useful Italian bones have fallen to Savoy
(Sicily and a bit of Milan) , and have whetted his appetite
for more. And there is always the danger that the dogs
may stop snarling at each other and join to bite their
masters. Till 1729, when Louis XV. has a son, Philip
thinks he may one day be not only dog but master
(i.e., King of France) also. Charles is probably the more
discontented of the dogs ; not only does he continue
till 1725 to call himself King of Spain, but he says, with
some truth, ' out of my Belgian bone my master has
sucked all the marrow, for his stupid Treaty forbids me
to develop Belgian commerce, lest Antwerp should rival
London ' : Philip on his side profoundly resents the
redcoats sitting on his Rock of Gibraltar. And so, ' Was
it for this ? etc., etc.,' is the repeated snarl of each dog ;
to which the two masters have little to reply but ' Get
you back to your kennels ! '
Endless Treaties and shifts are devised by the masters
for the purpose of keeping their dogs quiet ; but slowly,
slowly the conviction dawns on the mind of each that he
may be sacrificing his own as well as his dog's interest
by too ldng continuance of the Peace. On each side of
the Channel are not wanting ' patriots ' who say that
this is so ; and, after 1733, when France does get into
a war against Austria, there is a thunderous cry in
England that we are ' deserting our own dog.' Such
cry becomes part of the stock-in-trade of ' the Opposi-
tion ' in the British Parliament. George II. is often
i6o ELECTORATE OF HANOVER
inclined to agree with it. But, deeper than rivalry with
France or than any other English interest, lies at the
heart of both Georges a real love and a real fear for
Hanover, and of this every English Minister is obliged
to take account. The strongest cards a Peace Minister
can play are, ' If we are neutral France will not touch
Hanover ' ; and, ' If we go to war we must defend
Hanover.' And the Opposition answers, ' So, whether
we fight or don't fight, the interests of this great Kingdom
are subservient to those of a beggarly Electorate.'
Naturally the Opposition have the popular ear, for
Hanover is loathed. More than once schemes were afoot,
one so late as 1741, for separating it from Great Britain
and settling it on a younger son of George II. Lord
Chesterfield wittily suggested presenting it to King
James III., as a safe means of defeating James' claim
on Britain, " for," said he, " the English will never
endure another King from that country." The Memoirs
of the day are full of stories about the rapacity of the
small clique of Hanoverian courtiers and officials —
Robethon, George I.'s French secretary, Bothmar, who
stole the candles in the Government offices, Bernstorff,
who remained in England ' the power behind the throne '
till 1732, Munchausen, a relation of the celebrated
traveller of that name. English countesses found that
German ladies were fond of borrowing, and less fond
of returning their diamonds. But on the whole
Hanoverian influence doesn't come to very much.
When we turn to details, we find George's first Ministry
to be composed of two sections of Whigs, Lord Townshend
and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole, on one side,
and Lord Sunderland and General Stanhope on the
other. Each is set, more or less, on trying to trip up the
THE LONDON OF GEORGE I. 161
other. Their first job is an attempt to take vengeance
on the late Ministry, especially on Oxford and Boling-
broke ; they have also to deal with the first Jacobite
Rising in Scotland, of which I shall treat in a later chapter.
Oxford is sent to the Tower, where he practises laying
his head on the block. Bolingbroke flies to France,
where he serves, and soon betrays King James III.
Stanhope negotiates, in 1716, a Treaty with France,
which really lasts till 1730. A most useful measure,
the * Riot Act ' of 1716, is passed ; formerly any use of
' force unlawfully directed against authority ' had been
apt to be treated as treason, and the lesser crime of
' riot ' is now defined. For London was in a disturbed
state throughout George I.'s reign, and especially during
the Rising of 1715 and the trials of the prisoners engaged
in it. Jacobite recruiting officers swarmed even in the
military camp in Hyde Park ; for several years there
was grave disaffection in the Guards, and escapes from
prison were always favoured by the mob. The Jacobites
of London — a noisy, vaporous crew, when compared to
the real legitimists in Scotland — had their own special
haunts, e.g. the North side of Pall Mall, the ' Walnut
Tree Walk ' in Hyde Park, and their own ' mug houses '
on Ludgate Hill, as the Whigs had theirs in Cheapside
and Newgate. Street fights between gangs of hooligans,
calling themselves Jacobites and Whigs, were continual.
Executions, even of ordinary criminals — the first
Wednesday in each month was hanging-day at Tyburn —
and Parliamentary elections were also scenes of con-
tinual riots.
Another good measure of 1716 is the Act for Septennial
Parliaments. Passed merely to defer a general election
till more quiet times, it became a bulwark of the Con-.
VOL. Ill it
162 MINISTERIAL CHANGES
stitution ; for, if a Parliament, elected for three years
only, can deliberately prolong its own existence for
four more, it is obvious that an Act of Parliament can
do anything, and that the Houses are in no way re-
sponsible to the electors, as modern Radicals love to
assert that they are. It sounds strange to our ears to
hear that a newspaper of 1722 complained of the ' new
practice ' of appointing ' meetings of the Gentlemen of
the Counties to solicit votes for the Election of a new
Parliament before the old one has expired,' . . . ' a
most scandalous method and evident token of Corruption ;
. . . the very names of the Candidates are published,
and the votes of the Freeholders are solicited in the
Publick Prints ! '
These two Acts, however, are not a bad record for
Townshend's Ministry, and he and Walpole ' went
out ' in 1717 because they rightly refused to second
George's desire to fight Russia on some trumpery German
question. Walpole at once went into vigorous opposi-
tion, and criticized all Government measures quite as
much as the Tories did. His late colleagues gave him
plenty to criticize. They brought in, in 1719, a ' Peerage
Bill,' which was to restrict the King's power of creating
Peers. It would have made the House of Lords a close
oligarchy and been fatal to constitutional government. 1
Walpole fought vigorously, and threw out the Bill by a
large majority in the Commons. Less reasonably he
criticized the foreign policy of this ' German Ministry,'
which was marked by an Anglo-French whipping of
1 The existing number was then 207, of whom 26 were Bishops
and 16 Scottish representative Peers, elected by the whole Peerage
of Scotland. Sunderland's Bill proposed to have 25 Scottish
hereditary Peers and a total of 222.
THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE 163
the Spanish dog back to his kennel. The troops of
George I. were led by a son of James II. (Marshal
Berwick) to assist the French Regent in preventing
the King of Spain from restoring James III. to his British
throne ; so the situation was not without humour.
Admiral Byng blew a Spanish Fleet out of the water off
Sicily, and Gibraltar successfully withstood its second
long siege. But George and Stanhope were quite ready
to surrender that Rock, had not young Lord Carteret
prevented them.
Walpole also vigorously denounced the financial
recklessness of the Government. The South Sea Com-
pany, formed to trade, under the Treaty of Utrecht,
with Spanish America, was a flourishing, and at first
a perfectly sound concern. But in 1719 the shares
became ' inflated ' beyond their real value ; a mania
for speculation set in and carried away half the rich,
and many of the poor people of England. The Govern-
ment actually proposed to make over to the South Sea
Company the management of the National Debt. Some
of its members were suspected of criminal connivance
in this ' bubble.' The King's mistresses had gambled
and gained heavily in South Sea stock ; so had the
Prince and Princess of Wales. Stanhope's hands were
probably clean, Carteret's certainly ; Sunderland's were
not, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had actually
committed fraud. Walpole, while denouncing the whole
thing, had invested heavily, and made a great fortune
by selling out just before the bubble burst, which was
in September, 1720. Sunderland had been obliged to
readmit him to office, and his great financial skill
enabled him to pull the country out of this very awkward
scrape, in which thousands of persons were ruined. On
164 SIR ROBERT WALPOLE
February 21 Stanhope died suddenly, another Minister
committed suicide, and Sunderland soon resigned office.
Then Walpole's long tenure of power began in earnest ;
Townshend came back with him, and for a time Carteret
remained.
Walpole, while expressly repudiating the name, was
the first real ' Prime Minister ' in English history,
although Swift uses the term in speaking of Harley.
Once, in Walpole's own Government, such an office was
declared to be ' inconsistent with the Constitution/
But Walpole was the first man to base all his power
on a definite majority in the House of Commons, and
his system has grown until a man who has such a majority
can almost act as dictator. And he was the first to
be master in his own Cabinet, and to thrust out of it
ruthlessly all who could not agree to his policy. How
much of this was political foresight, how much mere
personal jealousy, is not easy to decide. He soon
became profoundly jealous of Carteret, and sent him to
govern Ireland, 1724. Next year Sir William Pulteney,
a most brilliant and unprincipled debater, had to go ;
then Walpole's own honest but hot-headed brother-in-
law, Lord Townshend ; next, Lord Chesterfield ; in fact,
almost every able man who served with Walpole was
successively dismissed. There was one exception ; the
name of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, who became
Chancellor in '36 and held that office for twenty years,
deserves to be rescued from oblivion, not only for his
invaluable services as an exponent of the principles of
English Equity, but as the ' wisest of the Whigs/ the
man who poured oil on troubled waters and mediated
between all sections of the Whig party. But, except
Townshend, all the dismissed Whigs went into fierce
WALPOLE'S FOREIGN POLICY 165
opposition, and, long before Walpole's fall in '42,
one-third of each House was a mob of disappointed
and factious men yelling for the Minister's impeach-
ment. Of the remaining two-thirds of the Commons,
partly by the systematic methods of corruption
which I have sketched above, partly by his supreme
financial ability, and partly by his placable and perfect
temper, Walpole remained complete master almost to
the end.
As for his foreign policy, it was mere hand-to-mouth,
and he disgracefully starved both the Services ; he
allowed the King's mistresses to job commissions in
both until, as Chesterfield said, ' Mrs. Salmon's wax-
work figures would be an excellent substitute for the
British Army' (1736). To keep on good terms with
France without an absolute breach with Austria was
the summum bonum of his policy ; for the rest, let us
have a Congress — any number of Congresses — which will
put off the evil day ; if Hanover is threatened, subsidize
German troops to defend it. Luckily for England,
Cardinal Fleury governed France much upon the same
lines. In 1725 there was a bad threat of war ; the
Spanish and Austrian dogs made a compact to go and
bite their masters ; and Gibraltar endured its third
siege in 1727. A fresh Treaty with France and with
the rising power of Prussia frightened off the dogs ;
but as for equipping an English Fleet or Army, Walpole
had no thought of it. In 1733 France and Austria went
to war, and George was madly keen to support Austria ;
but Walpole choked him off by telling him that a war
with France meant the certainty of a Jacobite rising
at home. And so
Our cannons mouldered on the seaward wall,
166 ACCESSION OF GEORGE II., 1727
and, when war did come, in '39, Great Britain was without
a single Ally or a single good wish in Europe.
On June 14th, 1727, George, Prince of Wales, was
taking his after-dinner sleep in his villa at Richmond
when Sir Robert Walpole knocked loudly at his bedroom
door, to tell him that his father had died suddenly and
that he was George II. George II. came out, holding
his breeches in his hand, and said, " Dat is von dam
lie," but told Walpole, for whom till now ' rogue ' and
' rascal ' had been his favourite names, to take his orders
from a nonentity called Compton, whom he, George,
intended to make Minister. But Walpole had long ago
made friends with the Princess of Wales, Caroline of
Anspach, Jeanie Deans' Queen Caroline. She was a
woman of extraordinary intellectual power and of iron
will, reproducing many of the good and bad traits of
her Prussian kindred ; equally at home in talking the
coarsest scandal of the most vulgar Court in Europe,
and in philosophical discussion with the greatest in-
tellects of the age. It is small wonder that she ruled
her silly, pompous, ignorant, irascible, low-bred, un-
faithful husband ; the astonishing thing is that she
should have cared to rule him, and should have
stooped to pay court to his mistresses ; that she
should have tortured herself, when dying, to walk
with him who never asked after her health, and
should have put up with his infinitely boring small
talk and his maddeningly methodical habits, for seven
or eight hours every day. That such a woman, half
cynic and half stoic and completely emancipated from
convention, loved power for its own sake, it is difficult
to believe ; perhaps, after all, she sought it from
a real sense of royal duty. In several respects she is
THE OPPOSITION TO WALPOLE 167
not unlike her dreadful nephew, Frederick the Great
of Prussia.
Walpole thoroughly understood her, and, through
her, impressed his will on the King. Before the reign
was a week old he had completely secured his position
by offering to procure for George a Civil List larger by
£100,000 a year than that which Compton had suggested ;
and, though it cannot be said that George ever liked
his Minister personally, he grew accustomed to him and,
on the whole, supported him faithfully. By and by he
had to support him against such an Opposition as had
not been since Shaftesbury's time. The strings of this
were pulled by Lord Bolingbroke, who, by a heavy
bribe to a royal mistress and by the betrayal of King
James' secrets, had won in 1724 a partial pardon, which
restored him to his estates but not to his seat in the
Lords. In 1726 he and Pulteney founded a witty news-
paper called the Craftsman, which devoted itself entirely
to attacks on the Ministry and especially on the personal
character of the Minister, whom it openly accused of
peculation. In the case of both these men mere spite
and faction were the causes of their opposition. But it
was quite otherwise with Carteret. This true statesman,
from whom, indeed, William Pitt learned the lesson of
the position which Britain might and ought to claim,
was the real inheritor of the policy of Marlborough
and William III. It is quite possible to argue that,
for that very reason, he was out of place in the reign
of George II. Descended from two great Tory and
legitimist families, he was never for a moment anything
but the staunchest of Whigs ; and his Whiggery was
due to his wide outlook on European politics, and
perhaps to his contempt for the St. John-Harley gang,
168 LORD CARTERET
which was in office when he first took his seat in the
Lords. To others politics were either a mere social
game or a means of advancing their private interests ;
to Carteret they meant an earnest study of European
problems, and a search for the means which would
maintain at their highest pitch the honour and interest
of Great Britain. He had never sat in the Lower House,
which he took no pains to understand ; his temper was
too lofty and his hands too clean to manage its rank
and file, and, as without such management no Minister
could then govern, Carteret failed.
' Frank with the mirth of souls divinely strong,' and
not only a master of all civilized modern languages, but
one of the greatest Greek scholars of the age, he was
always reading Demosthenes, or writing to learned Ger-
mans to procure Homeric texts for his friend Bentley,
when he ' ought to have been studying the Court
Almanac ' to learn how to acquire backstairs influence.
But it would be a great mistake to think of him
as a man without ambition. He believed himself, as
William Pitt believed himself, capable of leading
Englishmen, and desired to do so ; to him, as to Pitt,
the House of Bourbon was the Enemy to be incessantly
watched, and watched in arms. He opposed Walpole,
after 1730, not from factious motives, but because he
saw that Walpole was letting England drift ; " There
never was a Government," he once said," which had
so much power and so little authority."
Then there was Sir William Wyndham, the leader in
the Commons of the Tory country gentlemen, at heart
a Jacobite, and deeply compromised in 1715, but much
under the spell of Bolingbroke, whose ideas he reflected
in Parliament. Then there was ' honest Shippen,' the
ELEMENTS OF THE OPPOSITION 169
leader of the avowed Jacobites, who never voted with-
out consulting his King over the water ; " whoever is
corrupt," said the placable Walpole, " Shippen is not."
There was Pulteney, the very essence of factious
Whiggery out of place, a disappointed man, who, when
he did get a chance (in 1744), dared not grasp his
opportunity, and betrayed his friends. There was
Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, who had inherited
the wit and polish of his grandfather, the great Halifax,
but not his character ; a gambler, a rake, an orator
and a skilful pamphleteer, no one trusted him, and if
he had held office he could never have acted in concert
with any one ; but every one dreaded him, as he
was believed to be writing memoirs of his own times.
Finally there was the group of ■ boy patriots,' Grenvilles,
Cobhams, Lytteltons and, after 1735, William Pitt.
That the latter afterwards became a true leader of men
cannot palliate the fact that the first twenty years of
his public life were marked only by unblushing factious-
ness. Able as were his comments upon the conduct of
the war of 1739, and lofty as his hatred of corruption
undoubtedly was, it can yet not be denied that he
made his name by denouncing in sonorous periods every
measure of Walpole's, good or bad ; directly Walpole
was upset he played an identical game against Carteret,
and then successively against every one who excluded
him from office. For office he cringed to every one, even
to the King's reigning mistress.
From the year '29 a rallying point was given to this
miscellaneous Opposition by the arrival in England of
Frederick, Prince of Wales, cetat. 22, ' a puppy,' as his
father rightly called him. Father and mother hated
him and he hated them back, and so he threw open
170 WALPOLE'S FINANCE
Leicester House to the anti-Walpoleans, and promised
them all sorts of fine things when he should become
King, a dispensation which Heaven mercifully averted
from Great Britain. He demanded of his father an
income and a wife, got the latter (a Princess of Saxe
Gotha) and grumbled at £50,000 a year for the former,
though one would have thought it enough for such
a fellow.
Against this powerful coterie Sir Robert fought, session
after session, with a dogged determination and a courage
which must always inspire admiration. He had no
popularity outside Parliament, though ' the City ' had
great confidence in his financial ability ; he had no
family connections, being only a plain and very coarse
Norfolk squire. With the exception of Hardwicke his
colleagues in the Cabinet were, at the best, industrious
mediocrities like Harrington, Pelham and Newcastle.
He had no real hold on the King, who listened eagerly
to Carteret's foreign schemes. In fact he had but one
ally, the Queen, and, when she died, commending with
her last breath King and kingdom to his care, his
power began to wane. In fact Walpole found his best
ally in his own industry, his own easy temper, his
own mastery of the details of home affairs and of par-
liamentary tactics. And England owes to him one or
two measures of the first financial importance.
In the first place, he began a systematic reduction of
the high Customs duties on many important articles,
especially on the raw materials for manufacture ; and
he abolished all duties levied on exports. In the second
place, though he paid off little of the principal of the
National Debt, he reduced the rate of interest on it from
six to five, and finally to four per cent. ; his successors
THE EXCISE SCHEME, 1733 171
soon reduced it to three and a half ; and he established,
on a really sound basis, a ' Sinking Fund ' towards pay-
ing off the Debt, although his political necessities subse-
quently compelled him to devote this fund to other
purposes. In the third place, he began to relax the
restrictions which compelled our Colonies to send their
chief products wholly to Britain, but, when it was sug-
gested that he should tax the Colonies, he shrewdly
repudiated the idea. In the fourth place, by the
extreme lightness of his land tax he did much to
reconcile the country gentlemen to the Hanoverian
dynasty, yet without allowing taxes to fall heavily on
the merchants ; landowners, he said, are like sheep
who patiently submit to be sheared, so don't shear
them too close ; merchants are like pigs, who squeal
when you touch them. In the fifth place, he began
to introduce a system of ' bonded warehouses ' in our
ports, to which foreign products could be brought for
storage free of duty ; if they were re-exported they
paid no duty, but paid only if they were ' taken out
of bond ' and sold in England. Walpole carried this
measure as regards tea and coffee, but when he pro-
posed a similar plan for wine and tobacco and called
the tax to be paid on them ' an Excise,' he raised
such a storm as nearly upset him. It was a storm
about a mere name ; ' the liberties of England would
perish ' if the functions of the Exciseman, already since
1661 well known to brewers, were to operate on vintners
and tobacconists also : —
This dragon Excise has ten thousand eyes
And five thousand mouths to devour us,
A sting and sharp claws, with wide gaping jaws,
And a belly as big as a storehouse j
172 DANGER FROM SPAIN
When once, the song goes on, we have fed him with wine
and tobacco —
Grant these, and the glutton will roar out for mutton,
Your beef and your bacon to boot,
Your goose, pig and pullet, he'll thrust down his gullet,
While the labourer munches a root.
Obviously the measure, if carried, would not only have
diminished smuggling, but enormously increased the
oversea trade of Britain, whose ' free ports ' would have
become the markets of the World. Walpole in 1733
bowed to the storm and withdrew the measure. The
younger Pitt afterwards carried it without opposition.
The result of these measures was that the public credit
stood very high, and the foreign and colonial trade of
Britain developed rapidly. But a heavy price was paid
for this. It must always remain an open question whether
Walpole did not make a grave mistake in refusing to
come to the assistance of Austria, when France and
Spain attacked her in 1733 ; for it was her failure in this
war which led her enemies to attack her in 1740. My
own quarrel with Walpole is not so much for this mis-
take as for not being, then and always, prepared for
war. King George was always dying to go to war in
order to exhibit his one really good quality, personal
bravery, but always, too, he was drawn back by that
fear for beloved Hanover. After Caroline's death the
chance came only too soon. In 1737 a petition of London
merchants called the attention of Parliament to the fact
that Spanish coastguards in America too often mis-
handled British subjects (either traders under the Treaty,
or smugglers, who abounded) and exercised a tyrannical
' right of search ' for contraband goods in British ships.
WAR WITH SPAIN, 1739 173
In effect it was the old story of Drake's time. Spain had
been obliged, by the Treaty, to open a crack of window
into her mare clausum, and we were always striving to
fling the window right up. Her colonists as well as
ourselves profited immensely by the widening of the
crack, and Spain was foolish to try to close it. Was
she in force enough, out there, to close it ? Clearly not,
as long as she stood alone. But, if she took a bold line
and shut the window with a bang, would she be long
alone ? Her king was a Bourbon ; would not the arch-
Bourbon, the King of France, come to his aid ? Was
not France almost tired of a peace during which English
commerce and colonization were expanding out of all pro-
portion to her own. Though King Philip hated Cousin
Louis, and Philip's savage wife hated him even
more, there had already been one ' Family Compact '
between their Governments. From '33 to '35 they had
fought together against Austria, and been victorious ;
the Spanish dog had recovered two of his lost bones,
Naples and Sicily. Old Fleury might be carried off his
legs by the war party in Paris if only Spain took the
high line.
And in 1738 she began to take it. As Treaties stood
she was probably within her rights, and Walpole was
therefore right to seek, as he did, every possible form of
compromise. There is, however, a point at which com-
promise becomes scuttle, and, before that is reached, a
great Minister will tear up Treaties. Walpole knew that
war would mean his own fall, and he ought to have
resigned office rather than declare it. Instead of
that, after a Convention with Spain that was little
short of humiliating for Britain, he declared war in
'39, and struggled on for three more years with power
174 FALL OF WALPOLE, 1742
slipping from his hands at Court, in Cabinet, in City,
in Parliament.
By a stroke of luck, which no one had any right to
expect, within a month of the declaration (December,
'39), Admiral Vernon, with only six ships, captured Porto-
bello on the Gulf of Mexico, but that was the limit
of our success. Meanwhile the Opposition went, head
down, at the Minister. Pitt clamoured against every
measure of the war, as he had denounced those of the
peace ; and Walpole's preparations were so inefficient
that Pitt almost seemed to be justified. In February, '41,
a most fiery demand was made in both Houses for Wal-
pole's removal from the King's councils for ever ; it was
silenced for the time, but a general election in the
summer left the Minister with a vastly reduced majority.
His own Cabinet intrigued against him, George went off
to Hanover and deserted him, and, in February, '42, he
was obliged to resign. Cries for impeachment and for
his head — he was freely compared to Strafford — were at
once raised, but, though a Parliamentary Committee sat
for many months to enquire into his alleged crimes of
peculation, it could get no serious evidence. 1 He was
created Earl of Orford, and the King continued to consult
him privately till his death in 1745.
The war that had now begun and the year which we
have now reached are to some extent a landmark in
European and in English history. The Age of Wigs is
not over, and faction will still be rampant for many years :
but the Nation is beginning to awake in more ways than
one. Great industrial changes, which I shall notice
1 It is, however, a fact that officials of the ' Secret Service
money ' refused to give evidence in the case, and were authorized
by the King to refuse.
THE CONTINENTAL CRISIS, 1740-41 175
elsewhere, are not far off. The renewed struggle with
the House of Bourbon, soon to spread to all quarters of
the globe, will on the one hand incline men to consider
the infinite mischief of parliamentary squabbles and to
look for a leader, and on the other hand, will end in the
break up of the old system of Alliances and in a new basis
for foreign policy.
The war was popular at its commencement, and the
Funds actually rose when it was declared, but it did
not long remain popular. Our old friend the Emperor
Charles VI., who once used to stay at Petworth (1703)
and call himself Carlos III. of Spain, died in the
autumn of '40, leaving his dominions, or such of them
as he had power to leave, to his daughter Maria
Theresa, recently married to Francis, who had just
exchanged his old Duchy of Lorraine for his new
Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The lady could not, of
course, be elected King of Bohemia, still less Emperor
(though apparently, because the Hungarian language
has no word for Queen, she could be ' King ' of
Hungary) ; there was much doubt whether she could
even be Archduchess of Austria, or Duchess of Milan.
See what a patchwork the Hapsburg dominions were,
all held by different titles and passing by different
rules of inheritance. But the possession of the Imperial
title and of all these dominions by a Hapsburg, which
had been continuous for over two centuries, seemed
to be almost part of the public law of Europe, or at
least the surest guarantee for European peace. So
most reasonable people were prepared to tide over the
difficulty and to say, ' let Maria's husband be elected
Emperor and King of Bohemia, and let the pair of
them rule in all the old dominions of her father.'
176 FRANCE AND PRUSSIA
George II. held this view very strongly. Even France,
the mortal foe of Austria, had recognized it in
principle, and in all former wars, when she had been
victorious she had been content to take, in a gentlemanly
fashion, some frontier province such as Alsace (1648),
Lorraine (1738), and not to seek to oust the Hapsburgs
from their central dominions.
Now, however, there stepped upon the scene a young
man of twenty-nine who was not a gentleman, and who
determined to base his policy on what Machiavelli calls
1 the effectual truth of things,' which, reduced to its lowest
terms, is apt to mean force. Frederick, to be one day
called Frederick the Great, had been King of Prussia for
six months when the old Emperor died. He was the
nephew of George II., and their mutual hatred was worthy
of their family traditions. He was known to be devoted
to flute playing and to cheap French philosophy, and to
possess a well-drilled Army of eighty thousand men, in
which he was believed to take no interest. But within a
month of Charles' death Frederick demanded of Maria
the rich province of Silesia, and before she had time
to gasp out an indignant refusal, he marched his men
in and took it. Immediately up started, all over
Europe, claimants to the unfortunate lady's dominions,
Bavaria, generally a ' French traitor ' in Germany, being
the chief of them. The war party in France was
delighted, blew the flame, carried Fleury off his legs
and made him conclude a Treaty with Frederick. Some
of the Electors chose Charles of Bavaria as Emperor,
and he vapoured for four years as Charles VII. 1 Maria
fell back upon her Hungarians. She was a warrior
1 The wits of the day said of him that he was Et Ccesar et
nihil.
CARTERET'S MINISTRY, 1742 177
Queen of dauntless spirit, and a ' perfect dear ' in
private life, but, like other deeply wronged women, she
was to prove an intractable Ally. King George was in a
terrible fever ; she squealed to him for help, but, eager
as he was to help her, his fear for Hanover got the better
of his courage, and he was content with pouring into
her lap English subsidies, which Walpole, not yet fallen,
allowed him to do. All '41 things looked very black for
Maria. They looked black for England too ; huge
bounties entirely failed to attract recruits to the colours,
and impressment, for the Army as well as for the Navy,
was soon the rule. Admiral Vernon, with 100 sail and
12,000 troops, miserably failed to take Carthagena. From
Admiral Anson, who was sailing round the World in the
Centurion, to raid the Pacific coasts of Spain, no good
news had yet been heard. Spain on her own account
flew at the Austrians in Italy ; France had to help her
there, and it was only a question of months before
France would help her also against England.
Then Walpole fell, and George had at last got
a statesman to stiffen his back. The reconstructed
Ministry of '42, nominally under Lord Wilmington and
Pulteney and still containing Newcastle, Pelham, Hard-
wicke and several other old Walpoleans, was really for
two years in the hands of Lord Carteret, now Secretary
of State. To him, we know, France was the enemy,
Germany always the friend ; and by Germany he didn't
mean the ' beggarly Electorate ' of Hanover, but a
reunited Teutonic Nation. To effect this reunion, and
especially to reconcile Frederick and Maria, he bent all
his efforts and was partially successful ; in June, '42,
Maria agreed to the cession (she meant it to be only a
temporary one) of Silesia, and Frederick at once dropped
VOL. Ill 12
178 THE CAMPAIGN OF DETTINGEN, 1743
his French Allies. Hungarian Armies — ' bonny fighters '
— started from the East, and a French-Bavarian invasion
of Bohemia was rolled back. Carteret sent old Lord
Stair, a veteran of Marlborough's wars, with sixteen
thousand English troops to Flanders. If only those
sluggish Dutch could be galvanized into undertaking the
defence of that province, Stair could be thrown on to
the retreating French Army somewhere on the Main or
the Danube, and could smash it up ; but all '42 the
Dutch refused to budge. Carteret was very ill backed up
by his own Cabinet, and Pitt and his yelping throng de-
nounced him as ' sold to Hanover ' ; but he stuck to his
plan, and, in February '43, Stair, reinforced by powerful
Austrian and Hanoverian contingents, and following
Marlborough's old route, though not with Marlborough's
swiftness or secrecy, marched Southwards. By May he
had only reached the Main, and there he stayed, till in
mid- June George himself arrived and took over the
command.
Now we were still supposed not to be ' at war ' with
France, but only an ' Auxiliary ' of Austria. France
said she was only an ' Auxiliary ' of Bavaria ! Neverthe-
less we had got to cut off one large French Army, which
under Marshal Noailles had been sent to relieve another
large French Army retreating Rhinewards under Marshal
Broglie. George had absolutely no head for strategy,
and Stair, who was a good man, could get none of his
orders obeyed. Our commissariat system was, thanks to
Walpole, as defective as if John of Marlborough had never
hanged a fraudulent contractor; and at the end of June
we suddenly found ourselves starving, in a narrow wooded
defile of the great river Main, with a French Army, 70,000
strong to our 40,000, between us and our magazines at
THE BATTLE OF DETT1NGEN, 1743 179
Hanau. The French held both banks of the river and
quietly threw bridges between them ; then they encircled
us, front, flank and rear, as in a mousetrap ; the narrow
mouth of the trap was at the village of Dettingen.
There were three choices before us : (a) to starve, (b) to
surrender, (c) to cut our way through to Hanau.
Noailles' plans were excellently laid, and, had he or
his lieutenants been capable of executing them, it is hard
to see how a man of us could have escaped. But the
peace had been almost as fatal to French military educa-
tion as to our own ; they had ' hardly a Brigadier who
knew how to draw up his brigade.' Their leader in front
at Dettingen charged when he ought to have stood firm,
and so Noailles' heavy guns on the Southern bank of
the river couldn't play upon the head of our column,
lest they should shoot their own men as well as ours. 1
And—
Dapper King George was a fighter grim,
With some English blood at heart of him,
And a man of wrath, and a man of his fists,
And a wrecker of orthodox strategists.
His horse, unbroken to musketry fire, as English troop-
horses were apt to be, bolted with him to the rear ;
Then he cursed such cattle for cowardly brutes,
And led us to the front in his big jack-boots. 2
And one thing of Marlborough's teaching remained — our
admirable volley firing, which blasted away whole regi-
ments. For once, too, the French infantry, being badly
led, failed to do its duty, and we won a complete
1 The centre and rear of our column suffered heavily from
these guns.
2 Frank Taylor, in the Spectator, October 12th, 1907.
i8o SCHEMES OF CARTERET
victory ; the French loss was at least 8,000 — more than
treble that of the Allies.
Carteret was overjoyed, and worked hard for a union
of all German Princes for the recovery of the provinces
lost to France during the last two centuries. But Maria
thought far more of taking signal vengeance on Bavaria,
whose territory she now had within her grasp, than of
German unity, for which she did not care two straws,
and Frederick knew well that, if she were too victorious,
his turn would come next ; he knew she always called
him ' the wicked man.' German unity, in fact, was, for
more than a century to come, a mere dream ; and, even
now that it has been achieved, I have not heard that
they have erected in Berlin a statue to Carteret, though
they certainly owe him one. And in England, so un-
popular was King George that not even his splendid
valour at Dettingen could win his great Minister a
moment's real authority, either in Cabinet or Parliament.
So violent were the infamous ' patriots ' against Carteret
that even old Walpole was moved to speak strongly in
his favour in the Lords. Hence the results of Dettingen,
most favourable to Austria, were to England simply nil,
except that in '44 we screwed up courage to ' declare
war ' on France. France indeed quickly recovered from
the blow, concluded a close alliance with Spain, stood
up bravely to Admiral Mathews off Toulon, 1 and
prepared a great Fleet, with the Hope of the Stuarts on
1 It is commonly said that Mathews was beaten, and it was
not the fault of his subordinate, Admiral Lestock, that he was
not. Mathews' signals were confused, and Lestock, who had a
long-standing quarrel with Mathews, deliberately kept out of
the fight. A Court Martial afterwards acquitted him and
cashiered Mathews — most unjustly. The French lost one ship
in the action, and were not inclined to renew it on the next day.
THE PELHAM MINISTRY, 1744 181
board, for an invasion of England. On land she sent
her ablest General, Marshal Saxe, to invade the old
battle-ground of Flanders. Saxe swept up the frontier
towns there at a great rate, and our old Marshal Wade,
though by no means the ' grandmother ' that popular
song called him, failed, all through '44, to get the
Austrians to combine with him for the defence of their
own Flemish territory. The truth is the Austrians
never cared much for Flanders ; they were righting
on the upper Rhine as well, and were very reasonably
afraid of Frederick, who justified their fears by breaking
with Maria and springing upon Bohemia in the autumn
of '44.
Meanwhile, on the death of Lord Wilmington, Henry
Pelham, a vastly inferior Walpole, but a more adept
briber and parliamentary jobber, had succeeded at the
Treasury, and he and his brother, the Duke of New-
castle — two toads against an eagle — never rested till they
had got rid of Carteret. They deliberately intrigued with
all sections of the Opposition, even with Pitt, and promised
to all a share in the spoils of office. George yielded to
them, sorely against his will (one begins almost to like
George sometimes) , and the great statesman went back to
read Demosthenes in November, '44. No more traitorous
course could have been pursued than Pelham's. The
projected French invasion had indeed failed and the
plans of the Jacobites were put off for a time ; but
every one could guess it was only for a short time.
The safety of Britain, if indeed it were bound up with
the maintenance of a German dynasty — and no Whig
could be blamed for thinking it was — was deliberately
jeopardized for the sake of giving certain greedy Whigs
all the spoils of office. In seeking to combine Germany
i82 THE WAR IN FLANDERS, 1745-48
and England against France, Carteret had only been
anticipating the design of Pitt to win colonies and
commerce by tying France's hands in a Continental war.
Even stupid George, little as he cared for England, or
for Germany, except Hanover, could see that, and, in
the next year, it was brought home to him and his
new Minister in a tangible shape.
Early in '45, leaving a garrison of barely 12,000 in
Britain, Pelham sent 25,000 men to Flanders under
William, Duke of Cumberland, George's second son.
Austrians and Dutch unwillingly contributed as many
more ; and in May this allied force suffered, at the hands
of Saxe and Louis XV. at Fontenoy, one of the most
glorious defeats in the history of the British Army.
Again, as at Dettingen, we had to try to storm, by
sheer English (and German) valour, an almost impossible
position, and we almost did it. To us fell all the sad
honour, and nearly all the loss of the action.
Of the Scottish legitimist rising, which soon caused
the recall of the remainder of the English Army from
Flanders, you will read elsewhere ; but that recall
enabled Saxe, in the next year, to sweep the Nether-
lands from end to end, and to win the battle of
Rocoux. In the year '47, when British troops were
back again in the Netherlands, he had another victory
at Lauffeldt. He was already knocking at the Dutch
gates when, in '48, peace was somewhat hastily con-
cluded. In more distant quarters of the globe, if we
had lost Madras to the French, we, with the aid of
our American Colonists, had taken the great out-
work of French Canada, the fortress of Louisburg
on the island of Cape Breton. In 1745 Frederick
again made his peace with the angry Maria and
WILLIAM PITT 183
retained her province of Silesia ; in that year, too, the
Bavarian Charles having died, Maria's husband was
peaceably elected Emperor. In Britain, if the English
Jacobites proved, after thirty years of peace and
plenty, to be but a broken reed for poor King Jamie to
lean upon, and if they left Scotland to bleed for him
gloriously but unaided, it was made tolerably clear that
very few people cared to fight for King George. His
Ministry showed that they cared as little for him as his
people. Within a month of the serious defeat of his
troops at Falkirk, February 10th, '46, Pelham and his
friends came to George in a body and suddenly resigned
their offices. Why ? Because they had promised that
noisy man Pitt to get him a place, and King George had
refused to give him one. Pitt threatened to make their
lives as miserable as he had made Walpole's or Carteret's
unless they got him one. The King sent for Carteret,
who had now become Earl Granville, and for Pulteney,
now Earl of Bath. Granville believed that he could free
his King from this despicable thraldom, but Bath, who
had faithfully promised to support him, turned tail after
three days, and Granville's last chance was gone. The
Pelhams returned, bringing with them Pitt as ' Vice-
Treasurer for Ireland,' soon to be ' Paymaster of the
Forces.' Except the case of Lord Sunderland in 1706 it
was the first instance in which an absolutely detested
man had been forced upon the Crown as a Minister by a
family or party clique. It was an even deeper humilia-
tion for the King than if Pitt had been called, as people
sometimes say he was, by a ' popular cry ' ; in fact, what-
ever he became hereafter, Pitt was now merely the
nominee of the Grenvilles, Cobhams and Lytteltons, who
could make things very unpleasant for any Ministry which
184 PEACE OF AIX-LA-CHAPELLE, 1748
refused them a share of the spoils. George, who by this
time hated the whole gang of politicians, left them to do
as they pleased : " It signifies," he said, " nothing to me,
as my son, for whom I don't care a louse, will live long
enough to ruin all." The news of Prince William's
victory at Culloden reached London on April 25th, and
there was a disgraceful scene of ' mafficking ' in the
streets, which contrasted badly with the terror shown
when the Highland army was at Derby in the previous
December. For the last time the London mob, more
Whig but not therefore less brutal than in 1716, enjoyed
the spectacle of honourable gentlemen being cut up alive
for loyalty to the ancient line of Kings and to an ancient
political creed. But the sympathy of the educated
classes, in spite of political indifferentism, was freely given
at the trial of the loyalists in 1746, and
Pitied by gentle minds Kilmarnock died;
The brave, Balmerino, were on thy side.
Even this wretched Government, however, shaken
as it was by legitimist risings, and defeated as it was
in Flanders, could not wholly curb the natural pro-
pensities of English sailors to win naval victories and
to take French prizes. Before the war closed, though
there was no great naval action, the British Fleet had
mysteriously doubled itself, while the Fleets of France
and Spain had, less mysteriously, dwindled. Lord
Anson, soon to prove a most efficient First Lord of the
Admiralty, returned victorious from the Spanish Main,
laden with untold booty. Hawke and Boscawen had
begun their great careers, and Rodney was already a
captain. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) was
merely a truce between the two great Western Powers.
Though it left most colonial and maritime questions in
THE YEARS OF PEACE, 1748-56 185
the status quo ante helium, and though we therefore
restored Louisburg to France, we inflicted, in a land
where prestige counts everything, a terrible blow to
French prestige in India. by getting back Madras. As
for the right of Spanish coastguards to search our ships
in America, which had been the original casus belli,
the Treaty said not a word. It is even more strange
that Louis XV. quietly gave up all the vast conquests
that Saxe had made for him in Flanders.
The next six years are almost the quietest in Eighteenth
Century history, and this at least says something for
the conciliatory character, if not for the industry, of
the brothers Pelham, though more perhaps for the
wisdom of Lord Hardwicke. Dear old Lord Granville
was readmitted to a nominal office in 175 1, that of
President of the Council, and retained the position
till his death in '62. Except as a mediator he seldom
gave advice, but when he gave it, it was always on the
side of the honour of his country ; henceforth the politics
that interested him most were those of the Gods and
Heroes of Greece. The most exciting home events were
an attempt to naturalize Jews ; an excellent improvement
(Hardwicke's) in the Marriage Laws, by which it was
made difficult for a couple to get married without their
parents' will, or, as had often happened, their own ; and
a reform of the Calendar, which many unmathematical
people believed to have diminished their lives by eleven
days. 1 Various nonentities came and went, and offices
1 England now at last adopted the Gregorian Calendar, according
to which the year began on January 1st instead of March 25th.
The old Roman Calendar, which we were still using, had got
eleven days wrong ; eleven of the days of September, 1752, were
now struck out.
186 DEATH OF HENRY PELHAM, 1754
occasionally passed from Whig to Whig, but two deaths,
those of Bolingbroke and Frederick, Prince of Wales,
both in 175 1, took all the stiffening out of the Opposi-
tion and the King seemed to have surrendered blindly
to the Pelhams. Pitt remained Paymaster and quietly
studied military questions ; he gained great and
deserved honour, as well as popularity, by refusing to
take, in addition to his large salary, the vast perquisites
which previous Paymasters had taken.
But, before the death of Henry Pelham, which in
1754 broke up the halcyon period, the clouds were
gathering thickly on the horizon.
CHAPTER VI
THE SEA-QUEEN WAKES
She calls, and her ships of battle, dragons her seas have bred,
Glide out of Plymouth harbour and gather round Beachy Head :
She wakes ! and the clang of arming echoes through all the earth,
The ring of warriors' weapons, stern music of soldiers' mirth ;
In the world there may be Nations, and there gathers round every
throne
The strength of Earth-born armies, but the Sea is England's own ;
As she ruled, she sti' hall rule it from Plymouth to Esquimalt,
As long as the wind^ e tameless, as long as the waves are salt.
A strange Sea-Queen she has been sometimes, a very
prosaic, mercantile Sovereign Lady ; at one time a
busy bumboat woman— but anger her, and she is trans-
formed into an armed mermaid. But it has always been
so ; Mr. Ruskin, in his famous analogy of Tyre, Venice
and England as the three successive Sea-Queens, ignores
the fact that the hope of material gain is the one sure
motive for maritime exploration and adventure, on
which all Navies must be based.
The middle of the century witnessed a great awakening
of the Nation in many departments of life. In the
spheres of religion, of manufacture, of sea-power, a new
spirit was abroad, and the Britain that was to beat
Napoleon was beginning to take shape. She was about
to gird up her loins for a renewal of the secular contest
with Napoleon's predecessors, the old story of littora
littoribus contraria. It was not to be a War of Succession
ri 7
188 THE AMERICAN COLONIES
to this or that throne, or a war for the maintenance
of some stupid German province, or even for the ' Balance
of Power ' in Europe ; but a life and death struggle
for mastery in the New World, in the Far East, and
on the roads leading thereto. The Indian side of the
business I must necessarily relegate to a separate
chapter ; the American, which loomed largest to con-
temporary eyes, needs some retrospect into the history
of our Colonies, which we left as far back as 1660.
During the ensuing ninety years our settlements in
North America had passed from infancy to vigorous
and exceedingly independent youth, so independent
indeed, that, each on its own lines, they resisted a well-
meant attempt of James II. to fuse them into one federa-
tion and to appoint a single Governor over them. The
English Parliament, when legislating on matters com-
mercial, frequently treated them as a single unit and
imposed, in the interest of the Mother Country, restric-
tions upon their trade ; but it would not burn its fingers
by interference in their internal concerns. The Colonial
Legislatures were thus free to do much as they pleased,
and they usually spent their time in quarrelling with
their several Governors, especially when these asked
them to vote money, even for defence against Spaniards,
Dutch, Frenchmen or Red Indians. The seizure, during
the wars of Charles II., of the Dutch territories, which
became New York and New Jersey ; the settlement
of the two Carolinas, the creation in 1682 of Penn-
sylvania, as a Quaker province, with a Quaker Legislature
(which thought it wicked to make war but not wicked
to make money by selling guns to the enemy), and the
carving out of the territory of Delaware in 1701, filled
up the gap between New England and Virginia ; finally
THE AMERICAN COLONIES 189
the foundation of Georgia by General Oglethorpe in
1732 completed the famous ' Thirteen Colonies/ which
thus occupied the seaboard space between French
Canada and Spanish Florida. The population was by
no means exclusively British ; Swedes, Dutch, ' per-
secuted Palatines ' and other Germans were freely
admitted. New York especially acquired a cosmopolitan
character ; neither now nor at any other time did it
receive a charter or any definite ' British institutions,'
although the latter grew up spontaneously in that
Colony.
By the end of the Seventeenth Century the Colonists
were already beginning to spread Westwards through
the Alleghany Mountains, and they then began to find
themselves confronted by rivals very different from the
Red Indians. The occupation by France of the valley
of the St. Lawrence, with its dependencies insular
and peninsular, such as Newfoundland, Cape Breton
and Acadia, was on the whole more intelligently con-
ceived than the settlement of British America. The
French Colony was administered as a whole, and was
governed and well equipped from a military point of
view ; great statesmen such as Richelieu, Colbert and
Seignelay devoted attention to it ; great pioneers like
Frontenac, La Salle and La Galissoniere were its
Governors ; and these perhaps foresaw, as no English
statesman did, that America would one day be a battle-
ground between the two Nations. The despotic govern-
ment was powerful enough to override mercantile and
provincial jealousies ; and, while British Colonists were
often on the edge of rebelling, the population of Canada
was always loyal to the French Crown. France also
enforced better treatment of the Red Men, as she did
igo FRENCH CANADA
of her slaves in the West Indies, whereas no British
Governor dared to interfere with the sacred right of a
freeborn Briton to flog his own property, nor even to
remonstrate when pious Dissenters proposed to extermi-
nate the Red Men by selling them blankets infected with
smallpox. In an age when Protestant missions to the
heathen were all but unknown, the French Jesuits showed
the same untiring zeal and devotion in the New World
as in China. The gayer nature of the French people led
them to drink, dance and intermarry with the natives
— even to dress, as Frontenac once did, in their war-
paint and feathers, — but the dour Briton thought shame
to do such things, which he classed with the ritual of
Popery, so appealing to the Indians, as ' monkey- tricks.'
The result was that the French won the sympathy, and
often the terrible help of the forest-children, as our people
never did. 1
But in spite of these advantages the population of
Canada was of very slow growth. Where British
America may have had (say 171 3) half a million of
Colonists, New France had not one-tenth of that number ;
and the cession of Acadia and Newfoundland to us in
that year increased the disparity. The distaste for
emigration remained, as it remains, rooted in the French
people, and so Canada became a fur-trading and
military settlement, but hardly an agricultural one.
Even in the fur trade the Briton, better supplied from
home, cut out the Frenchman ; he had articles for sale
(including the firewater of the Paleface, of which the
sale to Indians was prohibited in New France) which
1 But when all North America was ours the Red Men came to
realize that only the British Government could protect them
against the British Colonists.
PREVIOUS WARS IN AMERICA 191
his customers really coveted very much ; and in America,
if nowhere else, the axiom that ' trade follows the flag '
was reversed.
But, if the lilies and the leopards were to go to war,
the geographical situation of New France gave her
three excellent ' jumping-off places.' In 1682 La Salle
had made a wonderful journey of 5,000 miles from
the Great Lakes to the Mississippi mouth, and had
founded the settlement of New Orleans ; from that date
his idea of occupying the valleys of the Ohio and the
Mississippi, and so of cramping the Westward advance
of British America, was never absent from French minds.
Again, France might strike at New York or Boston by
the shorter route down the ' Little Lakes ' and the
river Hudson ; and finally she might raid and keep in
alarm the rich New England Colonies from the Acadian
border. There was, however, no such war till 1689, and
* King William's War ' (as they called it out there) was
mostly fought on the Hudson and in Acadia, ' Queen
Anne's War,' 1702-13, in much the same region.
These two wars fully opened the eyes of French states-
men to the preponderance in wealth and population
of their British rivals ; the cessions made at Utrecht
had seriously weakened the outworks of Canada, and her
Governors set themselves to strengthen the remainder
of these by building in 1720 the great fortress of
Louisburg on that Island of Cape Breton which guards
the entrance to the St. Lawrence ; while, before we had
founded our last colony of Georgia, France had refounded
La Salle's lost settlement at New Orleans, and given it
the name of Louisiana. The possibility of a conjunc-
tion of French and Spanish interests in the New World
was a further disquieting factor for us, and, in order
192 SPANISH AMERICA
to realize this, we must take a brief glance at the West
Indies. There Spain was in even greater preponderance
over France than France was over Britain ; with the
exception of Jamaica, not yet fully developed, we held
only Barbados, whose best harbour was an open road-
stead, St. Kitts, Antigua and a few settlements in the
Bahamas — in all a mere nothing compared to the French
possessions, which comprised the great islands of
Martinique and Guadeloupe, with their splendid harbours,
the Western half of San Domingo, ceded to France by
Spain in 1697, Grenada and Marie Galante ; and less
than nothing compared to Spanish Cuba, Porto Rico
and Trinidad. By Treaty, none too well observed,
Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Tobago were
supposed to be ' neutral islands,' but France was already
clutching at them before 1740. With the exception of
Louisiana and of tiny British settlements on the coasts
of Honduras and Guiana, Spain held the entire coast of
Central and Southern America from the Gulf of Florida
to Brazil, from the Southern border of Brazil to Cape
Horn, and up again on the Pacific side to San Francisco.
We had a perennial dispute with Spain about our right
to cut mahogany in the forests of Honduras ; and, as we
saw in the last chapter, to this dispute was added, after
1730, a series of quarrels about our Treaty-trade with
other Spanish Colonies.
Spain of course did nothing to develop or improve
this glorious heritage. Her first two Bourbon kings
were nearly as stupid as her Hapsburgs had been, although
they had one or two able Ministers who spasmodically
tried to revive the commercial and maritime life of
the country. For the most part Spain simply sat down
and lived on the colonial tribute of gold and silver.
QUESTIONS AT ISSUE, 1749 193
' Pieces of eight ! Pieces of eight ! ' as Captain Flint's
parrot said ; that was the crop raised on the soil of New-
Spain. Still, Spain was the old colonizing Power, and
we were the interlopers. France, on the other hand, paid
to her West Indies an attention even more intelligent
than she paid to Canada, and, by the middle of the
Eighteenth Century, San Domingo was the sugar-shop
of the World. The best guarantee for British penetra-
tion into those regions was always the fact that France
and Spain were if possible more jealous of each other
than Spain was of England. Their two Governments
might make Family Compacts, but Spaniards over there
preferred the English as commercial clients. Not even
the exploits of Drake or of Blake had ever quite upset
the tacit understanding between the two peoples which
dated from old Burgundian days or even earlier. The
war of 1739-48 had interrupted this good feeling, but
without making the Spaniards love their French allies.
That war, on its French side, had been fought in Acadia
(whose population remained wholly French in sympathy),
and on all the borders, and had been signalized by the
Colonial capture of Cape Breton ; our Americans were
very angry when at the Peace we ceded back the Island.
Over there that Peace was hardly even a truce. La
Galissoniere, Governor of Canada, had openly planned
the absorption of the Ohio valley ; and the Virginians
were soon engaged in a race with his successor,
Duquesne, for the occupation of the forest region lying
between that valley and the border of Canada. Both
sides ignored the fact that a ' Boundary Commission '
was sitting in Europe to settle all frontier questions.
The building and garrisoning in 1749, with a colony of
veteran soldiers, of the town of Halifax as the Capital
VOL. Ill !3
194 EUROPEAN POLITICS, 1749-54
of Nova Scotia (Acadia) was an Anglo-American
revenge for the loss of Louisburg ; five years later the
French completed the strong post of Fort Duquesne in
the disputed Ohio region ; and so matters stood when
King George's Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, died.
For his succession Henry Fox, William Pitt and
William Murray were all candidates, but Pelham's
brother Newcastle managed, through his vast parlia-
mentary influence, to keep the place for himself, and
pretended that, owing to the King's personal spite,
he was unable to offer the Secretaryship of State to
Pitt. Pitt, who had only £200 a year of his own,
and who had just married, went into practical op-
position without resigning the Paymastership. Fox
became Secretary, and defended Newcastle's measures
in the Commons. These included a Subsidy-Treaty
with the Landgrave of Hesse for defence of Hanover
in the event of a new war ; and in the autumn
of '55 there was added a similar Treaty with Russia,
who promised to attack Frederick of Prussia if he
threatened Hanover. But what Austria was doing no
one except Frederick seems to have suspected. As a
matter of fact Maria Theresa had been for three years
knocking at the door of the King of France. Dominated
by but one thought, that of revenge on ' the wicked
man,' furious with England for having made her cede
Silesia, sick to death with the burden of the unprofitable
Netherlands, she was ready to overset any and every
alliance. Louis at first turned a deaf ear, but he
loathed Frederick, who had twice broken Treaties with
him during the late war. Might not such an alliance
as the Empress now offered him actually lead to a French
acquisition of Belgium ? If Austria cared nothing for
BRADDOCK IN VIRGINIA, 1755 195
Belgium, what had Austria and France left to fight
about ? At any rate any one could see the advantage
of detaching Austria from the English alliance. So
Louis dallied, more suo, with Maria's idea until the
autumn of '55, and long before that the tension in
America had become acute.
Even Pelham had authorized our Colonists to ' repel
force by force/ and, when the Virginians acted on that
order, and, under a young man called George Washington,
cetat. 21, were defeated in the year '54, it was impossible
for Newcastle to leave them to their fate. In January,
'55, he therefore sent out two British regiments under
Braddock, a favourite officer of the Duke of Cumber-
land's ; Braddock would show ' these provincials ' how
to fight. He also sent Admiral Boscawen to cruise in
American waters, with orders to stop French reinforce-
ments being shipped to Canada. Boscawen took several
French ships, and this act, which we called reprisal and
the French called piracy, led to open war. Still, in
fear for Hanover and in greater fear for Belgium,
Newcastle hoped to confine the war to the New World,
and, being utterly ignorant of the new Austrian move,
expected to isolate France upon the Continent. It was
Frederick who first opened his eyes.
Meanwhile Braddock arrived in America and found
' these provincials ' culpably indifferent to their own
defence, and to the numerous wants of his Army such
as waggons, horses, forage, food, things which a back-
woodsman did not need, but which the British soldier
thought he did need. However, at last Braddock began
to lumber forward from the Virginian frontier into the
primaeval forest at the rate of about three miles a day.
The story has been most finely told by Mr. Thackeray
196 BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT
in ' The Virginians.' Think of the gallant redcoat of
that day, recently enlisted from the plough, choking in
his tight stock, bursting in his tight breeches, loaded as
to his knapsack with every useless incumbrance that
a War Office could devise. We saw him at Dettingen
hewing his way to safety against tremendous odds ;
but look at him again here in the dark forest, a hundred
miles from his base (Braddock got very nearly to Fort
Duquesne), in a column over a mile long, with pioneers
in front actually cutting down trees to make a road ;
suddenly the woods echo with war-whoops, and from
behind every rock and tree pours in a tremendous
musketry fire. The word of command rings out ; again
and again we form front and pour our famous volleys
into — nothing but trees. The three guns are unlimbered
and crash into the trees as aimlessly. From General
to Private we face the unseen hail as valiantly as
such hail has ever been faced ; but two-thirds of
our officers and half our men are down, and at last
we become a huddled group of fugitives, shot down
from every side. Braddock was carried along in
the retreat dying of his wounds, muttering ' better
next time ' and other like words. Washington, who
was acting as his aide-de-camp, escaped by miracle ;
the Virginians suffered less than the British because
they were more expert at taking cover. The effect
of this rout was enormous ; two English regiments '
practically annihilated by one-fifth their number of
French and a few hundred savages. All along the
frontier a regular terror set in ; French troops were
heard of within two or three days' march of Philadelphia.
1 The 44th and 48th. Both were full of recruits, and the only-
service the former had seen had been at Prestonpans in 1745.
NEW ALLIANCES, 1756 197
But the Quaker parliament sitting there even then
refused to vote supplies for the war ! And, in spite of
Boscawen and even of Sir Edward Hawke's Channel
Fleet, France kept on pouring troops into America.
Equally unsuccessful were two Colonial attacks on
Ticonderoga, a French outpost on the Little Lakes, and
on Fort Frontenac on the Great Lakes ; only on the
Acadian border Colonel Monckton, with a Colonial force,
stiffened with some men of the 45th, captured a French
outpost called Beausejour, and began to export the
old French population of Nova Scotia wholesale.
Now it seems to me that it was madness on the part
of France to allow herself to be involved in a Continental
war at this time, nor did she at first intend to do any-
thing of the kind. Louis indeed had only unwillingly
resolved to fight England even in America and at
sea. But ' the wicked man,' best informed of European
Sovereigns, had an inkling of what Austria was after,
and he professed to discover a great conspiracy against
himself. Saxony, Poland, Russia, Sweden and perhaps
France were all to dance at Maria's bidding ; he and
his Prussia were to be partitioned. Frederick was
startlingly free of conventional prejudices — even against
Uncle George, to whom until now he had constantly
applied most of the ugly names in his extensive vocabu-
lary; and in January, '56, he suddenly astonished the
said Uncle by offering to guarantee the safety of his
Hanover against all and sundry. Newcastle and George
had recently learned with horror that Austria, to whom
they had applied, refused to do anything of the kind
(Russia had indeed accepted and had actually ' touched '
British guineas) ; and so this news of Frederick's seemed
almost too good to be true, and a ' Convention of West-
198 WILLIAM PITT TO THE FRONT
minster ' between Prussia and Great Britain was the
result. But how much greater was their horror when
Austria seized the opportunity to conclude in May a
defensive Treaty with France ! And how much greater
still when Russia declared that her Treaty bound her
to defend Hanover only against Frederick !
The peculiar danger of an Austro-French alliance lay,
of course, in the great probability that Belgium would
thereby become a French province, a contingency
against which we had struggled since Edward III. The
World seemed to reel under Newcastle's feet, and he
went about wringing his hands. Pitt, who had been
dismissed in November for denouncing the Russian
Treaty, was now playing openly to the gallery, the
Nation and the future. In truth the situation was
serious enough. The Dutch hastened to declare an in-
vincible neutrality. France was swallowing our Colonies,
and preparing either for a seizure of Minorca or an
invasion of England, perhaps for both. Pitt, after his
dismissal, had introduced a National Defence Bill for
the revival of a Militia, and the Duke had actually
denounced ' the spirit of militarism ' which this would
provoke, and got the Bill rejected ! As the panic
spread in the early months of '56, and as Pitt fanned
the flame, Newcastle's head began to feel loose on
his shoulders. Now or never, then, was the chance
for Pitt.
Hitherto we have been obliged to look upon this man
as the incarnation of the spirit of unpatriotic faction,
an adventurer forcing his way to place by spouting out
torrents of words and by making himself a nuisance to
every Government. He was an orator in the worst
sense, all theatrical froth and bombast, a coiner of
WILLIAM PITT TO THE FRONT 199
striking phrases to catch the vulgar ear, and as destitute
of logic as a modern tub-thumper ; whenever he had
crossed swords with Walpole or Carteret, they could
always prove his logic to be at fault. His strongest
weapon was his fine and pointed irony. But he was
for ever on the stage, and dressed himself in the tragic
buskin. Moreover he had hitherto been quite in-
capable of acting with any one else, or of accepting any
compromise not of his own invention ; he was grossly
rude and overbearing to colleagues as well as opponents,
and, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary,
he had by no means an infallible judgment of subordi-
nates. 1 But, to counterbalance all this, Pitt had one
or two gifts great enough to make him the man for
his Country at this her supreme hour. His hands were
clean of bribes. He could grasp the Map of the World,
and the strategy necessary for Great Britain, diplomatic,
naval and military, as a whole. He thoroughly under-
stood the value of morale. He had unflinching courage,
which only rose with danger, and a firm belief that,
under his leadership, there was nothing that Great
Britain could not accomplish. And, though no one had
suspected that he possessed administrative talent or
industry, he was immediately to prove himself, not
only the most brilliant and daring, but also the most
industrious of Ministers : —
5A.TO 8' €7rt fiiyav ov86v €Ywi> (3lov rjSe <j>aptTpr]v.
1 People generally speak as if Pitt had had, after 1757, a free
hand to appoint to the commands in both Services ; this is an
exaggerated view ; the King's preference for old generals often
overrode the Minister's zeal for young ones. Some exceptional
appointments, like Wolfe's, were of Pitt's personal choice, but
more were of Anson's and Ligonier's. As an instance of what I
said above, Pitt quite undervalued Hawke.
200 FALL OF MINORCA, 1756
The fall of Minorca was to prove his opportunity.
That fall was the result of gross incompetency at home.
The garrison was insufficient, and had not been
strengthened. Admiral Byng was sent out in March,
with indefinite orders and in indifferent force ; he found
the French, under the Due de Richelieu, already landed,
engaged in a difficult siege of Fort St. Philip, the citadel
of Port Mahon. It was valiantly defended by old
General Blakeney with 2,000 men, and blockaded by
a moderate French Fleet under La Galissoniere. Byng,
who had no troops to throw ashore, had only one thing
to do, namely to fight La Galissoniere till one or both
Fleets sank. Instead of this he fought an indecisive
action, professed fears for Gibraltar, and sailed away,
leaving Minorca to its fate. Then Richelieu stormed
Fort St. Philip, at a frightful cost of life. Byng was tried
by Court Martial and shot, a victim to the incompetence
of the English Ministry, and even of Lord Anson, who
had scattered our Fleet in such small detachments that we
were nowhere in adequate force. But Fox had resigned
office in terror, and Newcastle was left alone to face Pitt,
who voiced the righteous anger and fear of the Nation.
The Duke's last supreme degradation was to send for
twenty thousand Hessians and Hanoverians to garrison
the coasts of Kent ; " And you dared not," roared his
terrible opponent, " arm your own citizens ! " Bad news
also poured in from India and worse from America,
and at last in October the Duke threw up the sponge,
and the King consented to take Pitt as Secretary of
State, under the aegis of the respectable Duke of
Devonshire as First Lord of the Treasury. Pitt's
brother-in-law and evil genius, Lord Temple, went to
the Admiralty in place of Anson.
PITT'S FIRST MINISTRY, 1756 201
For the first six months Pitt had against him not
merely a hostile King and a hostile Commander-in-Chief
(Cumberland, who hated him), but a hostile House of
Commons, in which Newcastle, having lost the Executive
power, now bribed and jobbed more disastrously than
ever ; and, long before the new Minister could inspire
his subordinates with his own spirit, the Duke had made
his Government impossible. Pitt reintroduced, how-
ever, his Militia Bill, which was carried in June, '57,'
and he held out the hand to Frederick. Though he
was at once accused of having, in order to curry favour
with the King, eaten his words about Hanover (and
indeed there was a fine mass of confused feeding in
them), the truth is that he was really seeking to
resume, with a different German ally, the Anglo-German
policy of Carteret. He thoroughly realized that
France's hands could be best tied by involving herein
the Continental war. Frederick had, in fact, made this
path clear for Pitt, for, two months after the fall of
Minorca, he had suddenly invaded Saxony and seized
its Capital and Army. Maria declared that this act
pledged France to give effect in her favour to the
defensive Treaty of May, for Saxony was her ally ; Louis
agreed, and sent a large French Army over the Rhine
to seize Hanover. " Now," said Frederick to Pitt,
" send back those Hanoverians and Hessians whom you
hate so much, send your stupid Duke of Cumberland
to command them, to Westphalia ; keep a bold defensive
1 Each county was assessed at a definite number of men, who
were to serve for three years ; if not enough Volunteers enlisted,
ballot was to be employed among those eligible. The Lord-Lieu-
tenant of each County commanded its forces. The Crown could
thus call out a territorial army of 32,000 men.
202 PITT DISMISSED, APRIL, 1757
front there against the French, and protect my right
hand, while I polish off the Empress in Bohemia with
my left. France will soon withdraw the Army, which
now threatens your shores, to fight in Westphalia ; you
can keep her uneasy by frequent small descents on
unexpectant French ports ; thus we will play into each
other's hands, and France will not be able to strike her
hardest at either end of the line."
Frederick was, of course, a dangerous ally, for his
habit was to desert his friends, make peace with his
foes, and go off with a province in his pocket. But Pitt's
foresight showed him that Frederick had got his back
to the wall this time, and that the interests of England
and Prussia really coincided on the lines which the
Prussian King laid down. He therefore began to put the
plan in force at once, as well as to send off reinforce-
ments to America, two newly raised Highland regiments
among them. 1 But suddenly Cumberland refused to go
in command of the Hanoverian Army unless his father
dismissed Pitt ; poor old George, too, was clinging to
some stupid notion that even now Hanover might be
made 'neutral'; Newcastle jumped at the idea, and
Pitt was actually dismissed in April, '57. Then for two
months there was no Government in Britain except the
shadow of the Duke of Devonshire. At every door at
which Newcastle knocked the answer was, ' we cannot
1 Fraser's and Montgomery's. It is generally said that Pitt
was the first person to enlist Highlanders to serve King George ;
but, in fact, the Black Watch had been raised in 1739 and was
now in America. This, however, had been raised from Whig
Clans ; the new regiments were Jacobite in origin ; even this
departure had been suggested before Pitt took office. By the
end of the war twelve battalions of Highlanders had been added
to the Army List.
PITT'S SECOND MINISTRY, JUNE, 1757 203
face Pitt with an angry Nation behind him.' Old
Granville, the most placable of men and most loyal of
subjects, told Newcastle, " You are now served as you
and your brother served me."
No greater condemnation of the Walpole-Pelham-
Newcastle system of government by parliamentary
jobbery can be imagined than the condition to which
it had brought a high-spirited people in that fateful year
'$j ; and, but for the fact that the France of Louis XV.
was almost as unready, her government almost as chaotic,
the Britain of George II. must have fallen. One false-
hearted, nervous old man could paralyse the whole
machine of State. Newcastle had not what are usually
called great vices ; he was industrious and benevolent,
and, in private life, after a fashion honourable ; but
to control the votes of the House of Commons and the
backstairs of the Court had become such a passion with
him that he was not only ready to ruin his country,
but did actually sacrifice most of his immense private
fortune in the task. But at last, no other means of
continuing this task occurring to him, he went in June
to Pitt and said : " Let us two coalesce ; leave me the
bribery and the gifts of places, pensions, titles, ribands,
bishoprics, boroughs ; you lend me your terrible voice
and your terrible ideas about saving the country." And
Pitt, to whom also no other means of resuming his task
occurred, agreed. King George might bark if he pleased,
but he was now muzzled ; and Pitt, although he never
afterwards stooped to conciliate any one else, was clever
enough to conciliate his King, who came rather to like
wearing his muzzle.
Pitt thus came back at the end of June, '57, almost
as dictator. Anson came back to the Admiralty, and,
204 PRUSSIA ON THE DEFENSIVE
though Hardwicke had resigned the Great Seal, Hard-
wicke was Anson's father-in-law, and much good counsel
came to Pitt from both of them. Lord Granville sup-
ported him warmly. Legge, his old friend, became
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Temple took the Privy
Seal, and Fox, Pitt's one rival in debate, became his
Paymaster ; Fox loved money and had no scruples as
to perquisites. Cumberland was, of course, furious, but
events soon put him out of action. For the war went
from bad to worse. In May, '57, a fresh Treaty between
Austria and France, an offensive one this time, was openly
directed against Kings Frederick and George. Russia
joined Austria, and her great Army lumbered towards
Eastern Prussia. Sweden descended on Frederick's
Northern coasts. Frederick had won a great battle at
Prague in May, but a month later was defeated at
Kollin and driven out of Bohemia. The French Army
drove Cumberland and his Hanoverians over the Weser
and smashed them at Hastenbeck in July ; the Duke
retreated and retreated till he reached the sea at Stade,
where he might easily have held out. Instead of that
he concluded with the French the Convention of Kloster-
seven, separating England's cause from Frederick's and
receiving in return a promise that Hanover should be
treated as neutral. Meanwhile a new South-German
Army of Maria's friends was joined by another
French contingent in Thuringia, and was marching
against Frederick down the river Saale. In fact, five
Armies were converging against the ' Protestant Hero/
as the illustrious infidel now began to be called in
England.
But England, long in travail, had brought forth her
man at last. Pitt even bettered Frederick's instructions.
PITT'S FIRST MEASURES 205
He was no doubt often too hasty, and he was frightfully
extravagant, but it was a time that would brook neither
delays nor economies. No one will deny that he made
great strategical mistakes ; the whole of his policy of
attacks on French coasts is open to question. As
' diversions ' these descents were excellent ; but they
were entrees merely, and Pitt was occasionally in danger
of mistaking them for the roast meat. At least on
one occasion he offered to buy the alliance of Spain
with the cession of Gibraltar, which he strangely under-
valued. But the real merit of his offensive 'strategy
was that he saw the World as a whole, and knew in-
tuitively how pressure employed in a distant theatre
of war, either by sea or land, would divert the danger
from a near theatre, and vice versa. His first attack
on Rochefort, an important Atlantic dockyard of France,
was ill-executed and failed to do even serious damage ;
but the mere threat of it was enough to give the French
in Hanover pause, and to cause a backward movement
of their troops. King George had authorized Cumberland
to conclude a Convention, but not such a Convention
as that of Klosterseven ; at Pitt's suggestion he readily
disavowed it, and asked Frederick to send one of his
best generals to take over and strengthen Cumberland's
beaten Army. Frederick sent his very best man,
Ferdinand of Brunswick, ' the greatest leader of British
troops,' says Mr. Fortescue, ' between Marlborough and
Wellington.' Result, Frederick was able to deal in
November and December two smashing blows, the first
at Rossbach on the Saale at the French and South -
Germans, the second at Leuthen in Silesia at the
Austrians ; while Richelieu, the French commander, sat
inactive and uneasy in Hanover. In the beginning of
206 THE WAR IN AMERICA, 1758
'58 Pitt sent a small English Squadron under Admiral
Holmes up the river Ems to Emden, to create a further
panic in Richelieu's left rear. To Frederick himself he
sent a welcome subsidy of £600,000, and paid the same
four years in succession. 1 Cumberland was at once
disgraced for Klosterseven, and the Command-in-Chief
given to Ligonier, an excellent old soldier of Huguenot
descent, who had distinguished himself in Flanders
against Saxe. The Navy and the war-budget were
placed on a gigantic footing, though the dockyards
could never turn out ships fast enough to satisfy the
imperious Minister.
In America the turn of the tide was coming. The
English commander, Lord Loudoun, had failed in '57
to execute an attack which he had planned on Louisburg,
and the great French General, Montcalm, had been
able to push his outposts to the Southern end of the
Little Lakes and had taken Fort William Henry ; his
Indian allies had, without his sanction, massacred the
British who evacuated that fort. But it was a French
offensive for the last time. Pitt grasped the importance
of conciliating the Colonists, who had been disgusted
with the overbearing manners as well as the incompe-
tence of British officers, while these had rightly com-
plained of the stinginess and frauds of the Provincial
Legislatures and contractors. Pitt resolved to pay for
everything from home, except the mere wages of the
Colonial troops, and the result was that he was able to
1 Frederick could do more with a shilling than the Austrians
could with a pound. His finances were simple ; he never bor-
rowed, and levied few taxes, but the Prussian Crown owned and
carefully cultivated huge tracts of land. The rents and profits of
these were stored in strongboxes in the royal cellars year after
year as a reserve against war time.
CANADA ON THE DEFENSIVE 207
raise twenty thousand of these. And no reinforcements
were to be allowed to escape from French harbours if
he could help it. In February, '58, Admirals Osborne
and Saunders beat the Toulon Fleet off Carthagena. In
the same month Boscawen, with twenty sail, escorted
Amherst with a large British force to the siege of Louis-
burg, and in April Hawke chased a detachment of the
Brest Fleet into Rochefort and sealed the entry of
that port.
To understand the American business of '58, '59, '60
we must look at the map and remember that we are
now at last on the offensive. Our right is first to
tackle Louisburg, and then, if possible in the same
year, Quebec ; our left is to creep round by various
routes to Fort Duquesne, and then on to the Great
Lakes ; our centre is to force — hardest task of all —
the valley of the Little Lakes ; and the three columns,
if all victorious, will converge on Montreal. That this
was accomplished in three campaigns is a marvellous
tribute to the fighting and enduring qualities of the
British soldier, to the skilful organization of the great
General Amherst, to the watchfulness and resource of
the Admirals who kept the high-road from Britain open
and safe, and to the genius of William Pitt, who
planned the whole in London. The French defence
was as able and as valiant as anything in French
history, but before the end of '58 Canada knew that
she must rely on herself alone. Louis could spare
her no reinforcements, even if they could have got
through, and one large convoy of stores (very early in
'59) was all he managed to send.
Boscawen' s voyage lasted eleven weeks, and young
Brigadier Wolfe was gnawing his sword-hilt with im-
208 CAPTURE OF LOUISBURG, 1758
patience. Louisburg had ample time to entrench itself
to the teeth. The landing, on an open beach in an
Atlantic surf under a murderous fire from six French
ships and the guns of the fortress, was a terrible task.
The defence of the Citadel was protracted till the end
of July, and, when it fell, Wolfe urged Amherst to start
at once against Quebec. But the wise strategist decided
rather to reinforce our centre, where General Abercromby
had just experienced a fearful repulse and slaughter at
the hands of Montcalm, before the fort of Ticonderoga
(July 10th). On our left, however, Bradstreet had
pushed through the wilderness to the Great Lakes, had
captured Fort Frontenac, and was building a fleet of
small boats on Lake Ontario ; while a detachment of
Highlanders and Colonials under Forbes had seized
the dreaded Fort Duquesne. Among the new soldiers
sent out had been Lord Howe, who was killed at
Ticonderoga ; to him is due the credit of having taken
lessons from the enemy and the Indians in the art of
forest warfare ; he stripped his men of their ridiculous
tight coats, and filled their knapsacks with food instead
of pipeclay and clothes-brushes. Bradstreet, Forbes,
Monckton, Murray and many others were quick to
learn and enforce the same lesson, and so matters
looked hopeful for the coming year.
In the European theatre of the war the profit and
loss were about equal. If Frederick beat a large
Russian Army at Zorndorff, he was badly beaten by
the Austrians at Hochkirch ; yet ever the indomitable
man stood somewhere as near as possible to his centre,
facing now this way, now that, as the blows were aimed
at him from East, South or North. Ferdinand guarded
him well on the West, drove the French out of Hanover,
; John. Murray. Albemarle
BRITAIN STILL IN DANGER, 1758 209
out of Westphalia, over Rhine, and won a great battle
on the left bank of that river at Crefeld. On getting
the news of this, Pitt, who had promised Ferdinand
two thousand British troops, sent him six thousand,
and took his whole Army into British pay. He also
kept the French coasts in continual alarm by descents,
either executed or threatened, at St. Malo, Cherbourg,
Havre and again St. Malo. None of these raids, one of
which was beaten back with heavy loss, effected any-
thing permanent, but, as a whole, they wrought dreadful
havoc on French docks and shipping, and almost wholly
paralysed France's left hand. Old Lord Anson himself
actually took command of a Squadron and went and
dared the Brest Fleet to come out and fight him. In
West African waters, Senegal and Goree, two important
French slave-trade stations, were taken by English
ships. In the West Indies our first big expedition was
beaten off at Martinique, but seized the hardly less
important Guadeloupe ; the mere commerce-protection
we had to do in those waters occupied twelve ships of
the line and twenty frigates. In India Clive had turned
the tide of defeat, with the great victory of Plassey, the
year before.
Newcastle was already shivering in the grasp of his
terrible colleague ; he wanted to sue for peace, desert
Frederick and offer Louisburg back in exchange for
Minorca ! In this attitude he was occasionally backed
up by British merchants, for in a maritime war the
Nation with the larger commerce generally suffers the
heavier commercial loss, and the French were past
masters in the art of privateering. The fear of invasion
was never absent from the Duke's narrow mind, nor
was it a wholly unreasonable fear. The French War
VOL. Ill 14
210 WOLFE IN CANADA, 1759
Minister, Belleisle, and the Chief Minister, Choiseul,
kept that threat ever alive, and the more they were
beaten in America and India the more they recurred
to it. Although by the end of '58 France had not
one-third of our number of warships afloat, yet a big
storm or a small victory might easily give her control
of the Channel for ten days ; she contemplated no
lasting occupation of Britain, but only a great raid,
which would paralyse us at the heart by shattering
our credit. She hoped, too, to use the Neutral Fleets —
Swedes, Spaniards, Dutch — for this purpose ; these
Nations were already very cross with us for the way
in which we searched their ships. Neutrals always
suffer commercial loss, if, like the Dutch, they insist on
carrying ' contraband of war ' and on running blockades.
But, in spite of these fears, Pitt had already fired King
George with the prospect of conquering all Canada ;
and George was able at least to see how well he was
protecting Hanover. As for invasion, Pitt boldly —
perhaps too boldly — took the risk year after year, and
the results justified him. Moreover he took care that
Hawke's great Plymouth Fleet should never be far
away. 1
For the year '59 our greatest objective was the
rock fortress of Quebec, the key of the St. Lawrence.
Twenty-two of the line under Admiral Saunders and
Admiral Holmes, the bravest of the brave, had made
rendezvous at Louisburg the year before. James Wolfe,
cetat. thirty-two, was in command of the troops, 8,500
strong, with Monckton, Townshend and Murray as his
Brigadiers. One of the pilots of the Fleet was a master
1 Indeed the truest defence was to keep Hawke outside the
Frenchman's own front door at Brest.
ATTACK ON QUEBEC, 1759 211
mariner, once a draper's apprentice, and the name of
him was James Cook. The French removed all buoys
and marks from the fairway of their great river,
which narrows from eighty miles at its mouth to one
mile opposite Quebec, four hundred miles up-stream ;
but James Cook and his kind, sounding-lead in hand and
eyes ever on the V of the tide-way, found it ' not a bit
worse than the Thames.' What Montcalm had never
contemplated was that Holmes would drive his ships,
not only up to, but past the Narrows, right under the
guns of Quebec, and up to Cap Rouge eight miles above
the city. He tried fireships, but the English Jacks went
to meet them and towed them ashore with roars of
laughter. ' Well, let Holmes raid to Montreal if he
likes ; that won't take the rock of Quebec ' ; so argued
the Marquis Montcalm ; he had indeed more reason to
fear Amherst than Wolfe, and had to send a de-
tachment under Levis to strengthen the garrison of
Montreal. As Amherst advanced from our centre up
the Little Lakes, the French commander, Bourlamaque,
successively evacuated Ticonderoga and Crownpoint,
and fell back to the fortress of Noix at the North end
of Lake Champlain. Further he could not at present
be driven, and Montcalm knew the value of Fabian
strategy. Few as his troops were, perhaps 4,000 French
regulars and twice as many useful Canadian militia,
he held the whole Northern shore of the St. Lawrence
down to the river Montmorency, seven miles below
Quebec. Wolfe entrenched himself below that river
on the same bank, and also occupied the whole Southern
shore and a great island. His guns were able to do
some, but not much damage to the Citadel, and to wreck
the lower town ; and Holmes, sailing up and down and
212 WOLFE'S VICTORY AND DEATH, 1759
threatening landings above the city, kept the French
troops, both at Quebec and Cap Rouge, continually
' on the trot,' wearied them and often cut off their sup-
plies. But every attack on Montcalm's main position
just below Quebec was simply so much waste of English
life ; the French were entrenched to the teeth. Before
August was out Wolfe was dying of fever, and his Army,
one battalion of which had suffered murder in a frontal
attack on July 31st, was wasting by his side. Early
in September the three Brigadiers and the two Admirals
took the almost desperate decision to attempt a
surprise landing above the city. Wolfe, too ill to
attend the council, cordially agreed, and, having agreed,
rallied for one more week of glorious life. Saunders
with the main Fleet was to wait below, and on the
12th make a strong feint on Montcalm's main position ;
Holmes was to ferry 5,000 carefully concealed troops
from the Southern shore to some point on the Northern.
So in darkness and silence the English leaders slipped
up and down with the tide, looking for such a point,
for several successive nights ; and, after a long search,
Wolfe fixed on the cove now called after his name, a
landing-stage almost under the city walls, whence a
goat-path led up for two hundred feet to the plateau
called the ' Plains of Abraham.' Even Holmes, to
whom fell the task of the actual landing, and all the
Brigadiers declared it to be an impossible place, but
no other could be found. Wolfe took the full responsi-
bility, and was loyally obeyed : —
Tov 8' €k\v€ fjLrjTUTa Zeus*
7roAe/x,ov T€ l*.a-Xqv T€
AwKf, croov 8' av€V€V(T€ fJ-aXV* *£ a7rove€(r0ai. 1
1 II. xvi. 249.
CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 213
The men could only scramble up by catching at the
bushes and in single file ; but an hour after dawn on
the 13th, 4,500 British soldiers and one light gun stood
on a level plain within a mile of the walls of Quebec.
Montcalm, who had thrown his main strength to oppose
the feint of Saunders, now made his one and gallant
and fatal mistake ; barely 5,000 strong he rushed to
the attack, and within an hour was carried into his city
desperately wounded from a lost battle. The action
was short and sharp : the two most effective volleys
ever delivered — at thirty-five yards ! — shivered the lead-
ing French lines, and claymore and bayonet did the rest.
Wolfe, as we all learned in our nurseries, was hit early,
but lived long enough to learn that ' they run.' Monckton
was severely wounded, but our whole loss was not over
800 men.
Even so Quebec need not have surrendered. Had
Montcalm lived, and had Vaudreuil not marched away
his main force in a panic for the defence of Montreal,
it would not have done so. And if it had held out,
the British position would have been pretty desperate.
There were troops at Cap Rouge, not eight miles away,
who could easily have helped to enclose us between
two fires. But Ramsay, who was left in Quebec, made
little attempt to defend it; the Canadian militia
streamed away after Vaudreuil, and on the 18th the
white flag was run up on the Citadel.
' Wolfe was mad,' says your modern ' humanitarian ' ;
1 a brutal, boastful savage, reckless of his own and his
men's lives, who attempted the impossible and blundered
into a triumph.' That was not what his contemporaries
thought of him ; it used to be lovingly told in his- Army
how, as they stole down in the boats to the gallant feat,
214 THE WAR IN CANADA, 1759-60
he repeated, to keep his tingling nerves quiet, the whole
of Gray's ' Elegy in a Country Churchyard/ and said
he would rather have written that poem than take
Quebec. And even George II., not famous either for
tenderness or humour, said, " Mad, is he ? Then I wish
he would bite some of my other generals."
Perhaps the crisis was yet to come. The dramatic
scene of Wolfe's victory and death has eclipsed the story
of the splendid defence of our new conquest by Murray.
For Amherst could not get through those last few miles
from the South ; Montreal blocked all relief from the
West ; and our Fleet had to sail away in October before
the ice should come. The remnants of Wolfe's Army
were gathered into a half-burned, half-breached town ;
and the gods of a Canadian winter laugh at the puny
efforts of entrenching-tools. Supplies were very short,
and medical comforts and warm clothing there were
none. By March Murray had not 2,500 men fit for
duty — the rest were down with frostbite and scurvy.
In April, Levis, from the yet unshaken base of Montreal,
attacked Quebec vigorously, and Murray's splendid
sally was beaten off with heavy loss. He was at his last
gasp when, on May 9th, 1760, a British frigate forced
its way through the loosening pack-ice with the news
of speedy relief, and Levis marched sullenly away. Even
in that dreadful winter of suffering the first links of
affection between Catholic Canada and Protestant
England had been forged by the tender care with which
the dear French nuns of Quebec nursed our sick men.
As the peril of Canada became acute all through '59,
the French Government turned more keenly than ever
to the war in Germany and to fresh plans of invasion.
Ferdinand, soon after his victory at Crefeld, had been
BATTLE OF MINDEN, 1759 215
obliged to retire over Rhine again, and, until August, '59,
he remained on the defensive, much overmatched in
numbers, in Westphalia. Ferdinand was a man who
could make one army do the work of two ; and in August
the splendid courage of six British Infantry regiments,
especially the Twelfth and the Twentieth, and the ad-
mirable handling of the British Artillery, gave him the
great victory of Minden. Lord George Sackville, how-
ever, refused to use the British Cavalry, as he was
repeatedly ordered to do ; why some one didn't shoot
him dead on the field I have never been able to make
out, but he was court-martialled and dismissed the
Service when he got home. But not even Minden could
save Frederick from a fearful reverse at the hands of
Austrians and Russians at Kunersdorf, and, before the
year was out, Prussia had lost 12,000 more men at
Maxen. During the last months of '59 and the first
half of '6o, it looked as if Frederick and his Army must
be annihilated.
But these victories of her Allies profited ruined and
exhausted France but little ; unless she could strike
at the heart of England, and that quickly, she had better
make peace. Once more, therefore, she roused herself
for a grand combination of her Brest and Toulon Fleets,
and got ready a large number of troopships at Rochefort.
Admiral de la Clue got out of Toulon and even out of
the Straits, but Boscawen caught him before he had got
very far and smashed him to pieces off Lagos. Captain
Duff sat doggedly outside Rochefort, and Hawke ranged
to and fro, according to the weather, between Plymouth
and Belleisle, with an eye ever on Brest. At last, on
November 14th, in a lull between two gales, Admiral
Conflans cleared Brest harbour, and flew to drive off
216 HAWKE AND CONFLANS, 1759
Duff and release the Rochefort transports. After
him flew Hawke from the Devon coast. After Hawke
flew Saunders, who on his way back from Quebec had
heard the great news off Scilly. Hawke was not only
the greatest of living Admirals, but, so far as personal
feelings went, he was a desperate man. All the brunt
of the Channel defence throughout the war had fallen
to his lot, all the weary blockade-routine, and the winter
gales which drove him back to Plymouth month after
month, with leaking hulls and strained tackle, to be
patched up in a week, and then back to Brest half healed
to begin his watch again. At every turn fortune had
robbed his patient tactics of all the glory due to them ;
and he knew that Pitt strangely undervalued his zeal
and skill. Now the chance of his life was come, and so
he played a game that perhaps no one else would have
dared to play, and hurled his Fleet upon Conflans at the
entrance of Quiberon Bay on a dark night, in a winter
gale, on a lee shore. Conflans never dreamed that any
one would follow him in such weather upon such a
coast, and indeed Hawke piled up two of his own
vessels. But of Conflans' Fleet six were either taken,
sunk or wrecked, and the remainder fled up the little
river Vilaine on the top of an exceptionally high tide ;
it might be months before they would be able to get
out again. This was on November 20th ; the Brest and
Toulon Fleets were both as good as gone, and so ended
the great year '59, the ' Year of Victories/
Throughout the winter Choiseul kept on attempting
to induce Pitt to desert Frederick. Pitt answered by
fresh and fresh reinforcements to Ferdinand's Army.
Ferdinand therefore, in 1760, was able not only to hold
his own, though against nearly double his number, but
FERDINAND IN WESTPHALIA, 1760 217
to detach troops to help Frederick, and once more to
strike, though only in a short raid, across the Rhine.
At Warburg in Westphalia that gallant English soldier
John Manners, Marquis of Granby, who had been robbed
by Sackville of the glory which would have been his
at Minden, led the British Cavalry to a victory which
contributed principally to Ferdinand's success ; and in
every succeeding engagement till the close of the war
Granby's own regiment (the Blues) earned immortal
honour. Frederick, for his part, made headway again,
and, though very hard up both for men and money,
beat Austrians and Russians at Liegnitz in Silesia, and
Austrians again at Torgau in Saxony. In the East
Indies it was also a great year ; the year of the apiarela
of Admiral Pocock at sea and Sir Eyre Coote on land,
of the battle of Wandewash and (January, 1761) of the
fall of Pondicherry. Pitt would fain have struck at the
French East Indian base, the Mauritius, but was obliged
to employ the expedition he had designed for that
purpose nearer home. And in America the end came.
Amherst, with admirable prudence, left the direct advance
from our centre to Brigadier Haviland, who finally took
the position at Noix, while with his own forces he felt
round to the left till he got in touch with Bradstreet on
the Great Lakes ; then the two of them began to nego-
tiate successfully the descent of the St. Lawrence, rapids
and all, towards Montreal. Bourlamaque and Bougain-
ville resisted Haviland's and Amherst's advancing
columns with great tenacity, but were overpowered in
every action. Murray with his war-worn remnant
marched out of Quebec towards his colleagues, and,
early in September, the three columns converged under
the walls of Montreal. Vaudreuil, with barely 3,000 to
218 WINNING OF CANADA, 1760
oppose to sixfold that number, felt that enough had
been done for honour, and capitulated for the whole
of New France on September 8th, 1760. To Amherst
his due, which no one until Mr. Fortescue has really
given him ; the conquest of Canada was his work ; and
the difficulties of transport, of commissariat, of con-
ciliation, must indeed have been overwhelming. Yet
without a few Wolves even this excellent organizer of
victory might have failed. Six weeks after the fall of
Montreal died King George II., cBtat. yj.
Other people were dying too ; in January '61 died the
gallant French War Minister, Belleisle, heart and soul
of all invasion-plans, who had once been prisoner in
England, and knew something about the fruits of govern-
ment by Walpole, Pelham and Co. But even more im-
portant for Britain was the death in 1759 of the peaceable
King Ferdinand VI. of Spain, for he was succeeded by
his half-brother, Carlos III., a fine, rough, spirited
character, who hated England bitterly, and who did
something and tried to do more to revive the great
traditions and the prosperity of his noble people. Now
all sorts of nonsense has been written about the foresight
of Pitt and the blindness of his colleagues in regard to
the certain attitude of this new king. Any one could
foresee that it needed little to impel Spain, already
growling at our treatment of her neutral ships, to take
serious thought for her own American possessions in full
view of a Britain drunk with glory and self-confidence ; a
man who doesn't look out his hose-pipe when his neigh-
bour's house is ablaze is a fool. The point on which Pitt
differed from all his colleagues, except Lord Temple,
as well as from the new King and the new favourite,
John, Earl of Bute, was in wishing to spring upon Spain
FRESH VICTORIES, 1761 219
before he could prove that any Treaty had been signed
between her and France, and even without declaration
of war. Here he had even Lord Granville against him,
and here his imperious temper and reckless language
in the Cabinet gave away his own cause.
At first he merely took the very sensible step of
diverting his expedition designed against Mauritius to
the seizure of the island of Belleisle, off the West coast of
France. It might prove a most convenient exchange for
Minorca, or might even be fortified into a new Minorca
to bridle Brest. Its capture was one of the splendid
feats of the war, for it is a natural rock fortress, and
art had made it even stronger ; Keppel, Lambart and
Craufurd were the heroes of the siege, June, 1761. In
that same month Dominica, West Indies, was seized
by Lord Rollo, and preparations for a fresh attack on
Martinique began. But Choiseul had been for some
months suggesting a peace conference, and he now began
to slide in suggestions about the ' mediation of the King
of Spain ' ; next, even after these fresh losses, he began
to speak of the ' grievances of the King of Spain.'
From this time (say July), no one doubted that the two
Bourbon Powers were acting in concert in some shape or
other. But Choiseul, astutest of diplomatists, knew some-
thing of what naturalists would call the ' life-history '
of English Ministries, and of the pendulum of English
opinion. No doubt he was also well informed of the
temper of the new Court of England ; knew, for instance,
that Newcastle went whispering about the ' fear of ex-
citing all Powers against Britain ' and about ' no country
being able to stand such expenditure much longer ' ; l
1 There were then 200,000 soldiers in British pay if you
count the German Auxiliaries with Ferdinand,
220 SHALL WE FIGHT SPAIN, 1761 ?
that the Duke of Bedford and Lord Bute, originally
Pitt's friends, were ' shocked ' at his colossal notions
of British greatness — it was so easy to shock an
Eighteenth Century Peer — and that they were justly
alienated by his overbearing and theatrical manner.
A ' Family Compact,' closer than any previous Treaty,
and a Special Convention for immediate use were signed
in deep secrecy between Spain and France on August 15th.
Spain would declare war on England on May 1st, '62, if
England had not made peace earlier. Now Pitt knew
nothing of the details or of the dates of this Treaty ; in
fact, there is no evidence that he knew anything which
his colleagues did not know. But in September inter-
cepted despatches clearly revealed that Spain was
really only waiting to strike till her Plate Fleet, due in
October or November, should get to Cadiz, and till her
West Indies could be decently warned and reinforced.
And, though Anson, Granville and Ligonier were against
him, I think Pitt was right in wishing to strike at once,
not in order to capture the stupid Plate ships, but to
precipitate a Peace by bringing Spain at once to her
knees. But he was wrong in making no attempt to
manage his colleagues, who were quite willing to make
preparations for the inevitable Spanish war ; he allowed
his inordinate pride to get the better of his patriotism,
and resigned his office on October 6th.
His last plans, however, had been so well and truly
laid that Martinique, which proved almost as tough a
job as Belleisle, fell to Rodney at the opening of 1762,
and then Grenada, Tobago, St. Lucia and Marie Galante.
Spain, having got her pieces of eight safe home, laid, in
December, 1761, an embargo on British ships, and war
was declared in the first days of the new year. Spain
THE SPANISH WAR, 1762 221
meant, among other things, to hammer our old and
faithful ally, Portugal, into submission at once, and so
to close the harbour of Lisbon to us. France would
then overwhelm Ferdinand — 1761 had been a bad year
for him till July, when he won a battle at Vellinghausen,
since which time he had been again on the defensive
between two French Annies each larger than his own —
and surely some one could be found in Eastern Europe
capable of dealing the coup de grace at that man
Frederick. Finally, up should spring the Neutral Navies
upon the same side, and then let the Sea-Queen look
to her crown ! A Squadron of seven sail actually broke
blockade again at Brest before the end of 1761, and was
off to the West Indies to combine with the Spaniards
for an attack on Jamaica.
But oh, perverse fate of the gallant French sailors !
They arrived to find Martinique in Rodney's hands,
to learn that, on news of their approach, Rodney had
flown, without orders, to the rescue of Jamaica, and
that their junction with the Spaniards was impossible.
And oh, perverse fate of their Austrian allies ! On
January 5th, 1762, died Frederick's bitter foe, the Czarina
Elizabeth of Russia ; her successor, Peter III., was
Frederick's warmest friend ; one day the whole Russian
Army was threatening Frederick's very existence, the
next day it was under his command. As for Ferdinand,
odds of two to one seemed to make little impression on
him ; one knows not which to admire most, the man's
skilful strategy, his unfailing patience and tact, or the
splendid valour which he inspired into his soldiers on
every day of action. Meanwhile, in April, Anson sent
Admiral Pocock with a powerful Fleet and large Army
against Havana, the virgin capital of Cuba, the richest
222 CAPTURE OF HAVANA, 1762
city in the New World ; and from Madras another force
was sent to the Philippine Islands, to reduce Manila,
the great Spanish mart in the the Far East ; these were
Anson's last tasks, and he died a few days before the
siege of Havana began. Pitt's successors were wooden-
minded Secretaries, Bute, Egremont, George Grenville,
but they had only to take his plans out of a drawer,
and so they readily made use of them. They did their
best, however, to spoil one of them, for they let Cumber-
land (who now ominously reappeared and ' advised '
his nephew George III.) nominate to the command of
the troops for Havana an Earl of Albemarle after his
own heart. And so, when Pocock had felt his way with
astonishing skill and audacity along the uncharted
channel between the Bahamas and the North shore of
Cuba, where no ship-of-war had ever sailed before (a
biscuit-toss between reef and reef in some places), and
had thereby taken the city of Havana by utter surprise,
this worthy soldier refused all attempts to storm, though
the rotten old walls were not guarded by three thousand
men, and sat down to ' open the trenches ' to slow music
in a July sun, and in exactly the wrong place. The
Spaniard Velasco made a defence worthy of the greatest
day sof his Nation, and Albemarle gave him plenty of
time to strengthen himself. The waste of English life
was awful, and not till August 14th did the city yield.
Velasco died of his wounds received in the last breach.
The booty was enormous, and included twelve fine
Spanish ships in the inner harbour. In October, on the
other side of the world, Manila fell also ; while the
Spanish attempt on Portugal, which had seemed certain
of success, had collapsed five months before, because
six thousand British troops, with a good German Count
NEWCASTLE AND BUTE, 1762 223
of Lippe-Biickeburg as commander, had stiffened the
Portuguese Army, and three English ships, which were
all Admiral Saunders could spare from blockade of the
Straits, had sufficed to frighten the Spaniards away
from Lisbon.
As the story draws to a close, it is humorous to see
that Newcastle was soon intriguing against Bute as
eagerly as he had intrigued against Pitt. Bute, at
least, knew what he meant — peace at any price ; and
he withdrew in the spring of '62 the annual subsidy
from Frederick. Newcastle, who had shivered at the
idea of paying it, shivered at the audacity of withdrawing
it. To his intense astonishment, Bute coolly dismissed
him, and got himself made First Lord of the Treasury.
He called in Fox to be Leader of the Commons, and to
bribe that body into accepting any terms of peace it
might please him to suggest. He wanted to desert
Frederick and Ferdinand in some striking manner,
regardless of the fact that it was the latter's victory
at Willemsthal in June that led Choiseul to consider
seriously the granting of peace.
For now it was the victor who sued and the thrice
vanquished who granted terms. Frederick's Russian
friendship did not outlive his Russian friend, who,
after six months' reign, was murdered by his wife,
Katharine, in July. That lady became Katharine II.,
and recalled her troops from the Prussian Army; but they
stayed just long enough to enable Frederick to make
good his footing in Silesia once more ; for him, too,
peace was not far off. Ferdinand ended up in October
with a last victory at Cassel, in which Granby played a
distinguished part. As soon as Bute heard of the fall of
Havana he proposed to France and Spain to restore it
224 PEACE OF PARIS, 1763
to the latter, if Spain would give England the barren
swamp of Florida instead ; and on these terms the
preliminaries were signed in November, the news from
Manila coming too late to affect them. The final Peace
dates from February 10th, 1763. By it France ceded
to the British Crown all Canada, the Eastern half of
Louisiana, the Islands of St. Vincent, Tobago and
Grenada, the fort of Senegal in West Africa ; she also
restored Minorca, not to Spain but to Great Britain ;
but she recovered her really important West Indies,
Martinique, Guadeloupe and Marie Galante, while the
other West Indian islands, which we had taken, again
became neutral : she recovered Belleisle ; she received,
as fishing stations, two little Islands of St. Pierre and
Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland ; she dismantled
the fortifications of Dunkirk ; and, though she recovered
from us her three principal East Indian stations, she
promised never to fortify them again. To Spain she
ceded the other (Western) half of Louisiana ; and Spain,
who recovered Havana and Manila, ceded to us merely
Florida.
So the whole coast of North America from the Pole
to the mouth of the Mississippi became British. And,
in spite of the scuttle with which it had been purchased,
and the low political views of the negotiator, this Peace
of Paris was, like that of Utrecht, a ' great Treaty ' ;
the greatest statesman of the period, Lord Granville,
said so with his dying breath, and even quoted Homer
to show his right to be interested in it. If Pitt denounced
it, and even appealed against it, with some show of
fairness, to popular passion, it was mainly because he
could cry that we were deserting Frederick, which
to some extent was true, though not as true as
RESULTS OF THE PEACE, 1763 225
Frederick declared it to be. To Englishmen Frederick
was more than ever the ' Protestant hero/ and in that
capacity still swings, visible to all men, over many
an English public-house. 1 On similar signs swings, at
Dorking and elsewhere, ' the Marquis of Granby.'
As for Ferdinand, ' the men that fought at Minden '
showed the same mutinous unwillingness to leave his
Army as the men that fought at Malplaquet had shown
to leave Eugene's. John, Earl of Bute, on the other
hand, dared hardly appear in the streets ; the mob
rejoiced to consume, in one bonfire with a Jack Boot,
a lady's petticoat, in allusion to the fact that the hand-
some Scot was supposed to be too fond of George III.'s
amiable mother. All this was a bad omen for the new
reign. The epitaph on the old one was spoken seven
years later by Edmund Burke. 8
One of the half-forgotten lessons of the war is ' never
despise the French Navy.' 3 At the Peace England had
1 Perhaps this is a recollection of childhood ; recently I have
noticed that the sign of the ' King of Prussia ' usually resembles
the late Emperor William I.
2 " George II. carried the glory, the power, the commerce of
England to an height unknown even to this renowned Nation in
the times of its greatest prosperity ; and he left his succession
resting on the true and only foundation of all national and all
regal greatness ; affection at home, reputation abroad, trust in
Allies, terror in rival Nations. The most ardent lover of his
country cannot wish for Great Britain an happier fate than
to continue as she was then left." — Burke, ' Thoughts on the
Present Discontents.'
3 " We may laugh at 'em," said my Father, " and call 'em
Johnny Crapows, but they are a right brave nation, if they
ar'n't good seamen ; but that I reckons the fault of their lingo,
for it's too noisy to carry on duty well with, and so they never
will be sailors till they lam English." — Captain Marryat's
' Poor Jack,' p. 31.
VOL. Ill 15
226 THE FRENCH NAVY
at least no great ships in full commission and in
perfect fighting trim, such a Navy as the world had
never seen. But France, with not half that number,
and seldom during the whole war with much above
half the existing English number, had never entirely
relaxed her efforts : ' She kept the command of the
sea in dispute till the very end.' When she made
peace her great Minister Choiseul industriously set to
work to increase her naval strength ; while the Sea-
Queen hung up her crown in Westminster Abbey and
went to sleep again, or allowed dirty political party
squabbles to fritter away her strength.
CHAPTER VII
<AN END OF AN AULD SANG'
(SCOTLAND, 1 660-1 745)
The return of King Charles was welcomed by all Scots-
men, except a few fanatics, with universal joy. Yet
the Protectorate had had its merits ; if it had enforced
upon Scotland a sham Parliamentary Union, it had given
her free trade with England, and, in the teeth of the
shrieking Covenanters, it had silenced the Assembly of
the Kirk and insisted on the ' deadly and damnable sin
of toleration.'
Charles repealed the Union and restored the Scots
Parliament, but his English Parliament took away
the iree trade, and excluded Scots from the benefit of
the Navigation Act. The settlement of the religious
question, which was the thorniest of all, satisfied very
few ; and the result was that Scotland was miserable.
The fact is that she had been miserable ever since 1603.
From 1603 to 1638 she had suffered all the evils of Home
Rule in its worst form, and yet had been treated as a
half alien Dependency ; then she had asserted herself
by arms, and had been conquered at last only owing to
her own fierce internal dissensions. She had been cut
off, since the Reformation, from her old civilizing inter-
course with France, and Holland had only recently
227
228 TEMPER OF SCOTLAND, 1660
begun to take the place of France as the refuge in which
exiles could imbibe new political ideas.
Yet she had learned something from the Civil Wars.
She could not help seeing that the Houses at West-
minster were a very different thing from her own single
chamber of Parliament, ' in which they sat a' thegither,
cheek by choul, and didna need to hae the same blethers
twice ower again,' but which used, in spite of this ad-
vantage, to delegate its powers to a Committee called
the ' Lords of the Articles/ virtually nominated by the
Crown. Moreover, she saw England getting richer and
richer, and herself condemned to hopeless poverty for
want of a market. And so, though the religious question
loomed large to contemporaries, and has been allowed
in history to overshadow all others, we must remember
that constitutional and commercial grievances loomed
large too, and could never get a perfectly satisfactory
settlement. I will return to them by and by, but
meanwhile we had better follow the beaten track and
discuss the events that led to the so-called ' Killing
times.'
We must remember ab initio two things : (1) That the
Kirk — reserving that name for the Presbyterian Kirk
alone — was divided in itself, into moderates or ' Reso-
lutioners ' and fanatics or ' Protesters.' Both alike were
strong Calvinists in doctrine, and clung to the ' West-
minster Confession ' of 1647 ; but it was the latter alone
who demanded the enforcement of the Covenant, upon
pain of death, on every subject of King Charles. (2)
That in 1660 the Episcopalian Church of Charles I. had
been reduced to a mere ' suffering remnant,' numerically
not greater than the still more suffering Catholic Church.
For the first two years, indeed, the Earl of Middleton,
THE QUESTION OF REVENGE 229
once a Covenanter but subsequently a Royalist, who
had commanded the cavalry at Worcester fight, did
attempt, in the teeth of Scottish sentiment, a restoration
of Episcopacy pure and simple ; but the real settlement
dates from 1663, when Lauderdale, a far more shrewd
statesman, got the ear of the King and tried to bring
about a fusion of the Episcopalian ' remnant ' with the
Moderates of the Kirk ; and, if we cry out upon the
failure of the experiment, and regret that it was begun
two years too late, we must still admit that it was an
honest attempt to find a via media. But the via media
was vitiated by the political circumstances in which it
was tried, and by those of the two years preceding it ; it
was Royalists who had to be restored and indemnified,
and many Royalists had been Episcopalians. The
bloody savagery of Argyll towards every Royalist and
every personal enemy had gone hand in hand with the
1 rabbling ' of Episcopalian clergy by the Covenanting
mob. Could Scotland — the last home of the family
feud in civilized Europe — be expected to exact no
vengeance for these things ? I think, on the whole,
the vengeance was very moderate, but it was unfortunate
that the religious settlement was mixed up in men's
minds with the political and personal vengeance ; they
appeared to be part and parcel of the same thing, and
the sufferers by the political vengeance were given the
air of religious martyrs. Argyll, who had given Mont-
rose no trial, got a fair trial and was beheaded. Johnstone
of Warristoun and two ministers — one Guthrie, who
was openly calling out, in his * Causes of God's Wrath,'
for civil war — were hanged. The Scots Parliament
repealed en bloc all civil and religious Acts passed since
1639, passed a moderate Act of Supremacy, imposed
230 THE KIRK QUESTION
on all holders of office an oath of ' non-resistance/ and
re-established an Episcopal Church. But it did not
burn, as the English Parliament burned, the Covenant
by the hands of the hangman, it did not impose Laud's
or any other Prayer Book, and there was no difference
in doctrine or ritual between the ' Kirk ' and this new
' Church,' except that the ' curates ' or ' piskies,' as
their opponents called the new ministers, got into the
habit of using the Lord's Prayer and the Gloria Patri.
All alike prayed and preached extempore in black gowns,
administered the Sacrament to sitting communicants,
held Kirk Sessions and Synods, and enforced morality
(?) by making naughty people stand on the stool of
repentance to be preached at.
What, then, was all the subsequent fuss about ?
Not about ritual, not about doctrine, not even, I think,
because the Church was now governed by fourteen
Bishops ; but because the General Assembly of the
Kirk was taken away, and, with it, the power, which
the Kirk had so fearfully abused, of excommunication.
In other words, it was about Erastianism — the ' black
Erastianism ' ; the State had imposed forms upon the
Church. The Covenanters did not want toleration, they
spurned it when it was hurled at them by three successive
* Declarations of Indulgence ' ; they desired to tyrannize
over men's souls (and bodies) with a tyranny compared
to which Laud's had been a mild paternal chastisement
It is perfectly clear that nothing short of supremacy
over every department of State, over every act of family
and individual life, would have satisfied those who now
cried out against the new settlement. Now no reason-
able Government could permit this ; and, when time
after time their prophets rose in rebellion for this
•WHIGS' AND 'TORIES' 231
f
cause, no Government could have refused to suppress
them.
So manifest did these things become that, in spite of
the fact that the shaping of the Episcopal Church fell
into bad hands, in spite of the blunders and cruelty
of many who had the task of suppressing revolts,
cruelty sometimes involving flagrant violations of civil
liberty, the loyalty of five-sixths of Scotland to King
Charles was never in the least shaken, and its loyalty
to King James VII. only ended when he began to in-
troduce Popery with a high hand. Nay more, a large
majority of the Nation had before 1689 rallied to the
very moderate Episcopal Church. Thus it was a
minority, and mainly a political minority, which tri-
umphed with the substitution of Presbyterianism for
Episcopacy in 1690. And, as we have seen in England
during the struggle of 1679-89, High Church and Low
Church becoming ' Tory ' and ' Whig/ so in Scotland
Whig and Tory ultimately became but names for Pres-
byterian-Hanoverian and Episcopalian- Jacobite. The
last dying embers of the family feud came in to aid this ;
a Cameron or a Macdonald, an Ogilvy or a Graham,
was bound to be a Tory just because a Campbell, a
Mackay, or a Dalrymple was sure to be a Whig. All
that is changed now, but perhaps in the hearts of some
of us the old song still finds an echo : —
To see gude corn upon the rigs,
And a gallows built to hang the Whigs,
And the Right restored where the Right should be,
Oh ! that is the thing that would wanton me.
Alas ! there are no Whigs left to hang ; and, if there
were, there are few Tories of convictions strong enough
to pull at the tow ; the Right has passed away unre-
232 THE BISHOPS
storable, and the green rigs of many a Scottish county
are blackened slag-heaps or covered with roaring
furnaces.
But the shaping of the Church did fall into bad hands.
Only one Bishop of Charles I.'s time survived ; thirteen
Sees and five-sixths of the manses had to be filled
with moderate Presbyterians who accepted Episcopacy.
James Sharp, minister of Crail, an astute man, had
been sent to negotiate at Breda and London on behalf
of the Kirk. Convinced (by whatever arguments) that
the maintenance of the Kirk was hopeless, he returned
to Scotland as Archbishop of St. Andrews. To the
' godly ' he at once became a compound of Lucifer and
Laud, of Judas and Strafford, to slay whom became the
first duty of every champion of the broken Covenant.
He was, indeed, selfish, grasping and vulgar, and he
cringed to the Royalist nobles, who despised him and told
him so. Only one of the Restoration bishops, Robert
Leighton, was specially famous for learning or piety,
and oddly enough he was the son of that ferocious
Alexander Leighton whom Laud had whipped for
denouncing Bishops as " knobs and wens of bunchy
Popish flesh." Could Leighton have ruled at St.
Andrews the subsequent history of Scotland might
have been different ; and yet Leighton, after all, was a
Saint rather than a Statesman.
At first some three hundred Covenanting ministers
refused to conform to the new Establishment. This
number was gradually reduced by successive Declara-
tions of Indulgence to less than a hundred, and all who
finally refused were 'outed,' 1 and their lot was very hard.
1 Remember that in England two thousand were ' outed ' in
1 66?.
REPRESSION AND REBELLION 233
Persecution of such there undoubtedly was, and by very
rough hands, for they rebelled, and suppression of rebel-
lion easily develops into persecution. The ' Martyrs of
the Covenant/ who had, in the hour of their triumph,
been zealous even unto slaying, though their numbers
and sufferings have been ludicrously exaggerated by
Whig tradition, are a real fact, and one which we
can never sufficiently regret. But the persecution was
never consistent. The main agents were the Scottish
Privy Council and Sharpe's ' Court of High Commission,'
established in 1664 for the purpose of enforcing con-
formity. The Privy Council was constantly hampered
by contradictory instructions from London, and
perhaps sometimes exceeded these instructions. Charles,
much as he had hated the old Kirk, was all for toleration
except in cases of rebellion. Clarendon hated the whole
* nation of vermin,' as he called the Scots, and other
English Ministers were profoundly indifferent. The
persecutors in the Council were the very men who, then
and afterwards, were defending the independence of
Scotland against Clarendon and his kind. Further,
we must not forget that every symptom of modera-
tion, every grant of indulgence, was treated by the
Covenanters (as such things always are treated by
Radicals) as a confession of weakness ; that the Dutch
were constantly intriguing with the malcontents, that
they fomented the rising of 1666 and tried to foment
another in 1672 ; that Holland swarmed with plotters
and exiles from Scotland ; finally, that the Covenanters,
when they had once taken up arms, established a perfect
reign of terror, not only in Galloway but in all the five
South-Western shires, in which district alone there was
discontent. No curate's house or person was safe in
234 POLICY OF LAUDERDALE
that remote country ; and the ' prophets/ Welsh,
Cargill, Peden, Cameron, constantly travelled about
exciting the peasantry to the work of ' rabbling,' and
denouncing the King and his Ministers by every evil
name known to Old Testament history.
The leading director of the Scottish Privy Council
from 1663-78 was John Maitland, Earl, and soon Duke of
Lauderdale, once the delegate of the Presbyterians in the
Westminster Assembly. He had been the King's personal
friend ever since '49, and, in '5o-'5i, had saved him
from many humiliations at the hands of Argyll. From
Worcester till the Restoration he had been in prison ; of
coarse talk and immoral life, he was yet a finished scholar
and linguist and a wit among the wits at Whitehall. If
Sharp was an apostate, Lauderdale was a mocking
apostate, ' ready to take a cartload of oaths.' For
Bishops as such he cared not a jot, and made them feel
it. For Scotland he cared a good deal, and resisted
stoutly all Anglicizing measures. Rivals he had in
plenty, but till the day of his death, 1682, he retained
the King's favour, though he took no part in affairs after
'79. Just about the date of Lauderdale's retirement
we meet other two whom Whig tradition has raised to
a Satanic eminence, the accomplished scholar and lawyer
Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, the founder of the
Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, ' the bluidy advocate
Mackenyie, who for his worldly wit and wisdom had
been to the rest as a God ' ; and John Graham of Claver-
house, of royal blood and also of kin to the great Marquis
of Montrose. Claverhouse had fought under William of
Orange and saved his life at Seneff ; * he, too, was a man
1 There has been a controversy over this fact ; certainly
Claverhouse was in William's service at the time.
THE CONVENTICLES 235
of carnal learning, odious to the godly, who regretted
that they could never prove him to be addicted to wine
and women as most of the Tories were supposed to be.
Behind these leading figures come the lesser lights,
whom Scott, in the weirdest of all his tales, has gathered
round the infernal table — ' the fierce Middleton, the
dissolute Rothes . . . Dalyell with his bald head and a
beard to his girdle ' (he had served in Russia and let
his beard grow ever since Charles L's death) . . . ' and
wild Bonshaw that tied blessed Mr. Cargill's limbs till
the blude sprung,' etc., etc.
The Acts which made persecution law were of course
Acts of the Scottish Parliament : but we must remember
that the Crown, through the Lords of the Articles,
decided what Bills should and what should not be
brought in and read, and also that from 1673 to 1681 no
Parliament met. The Act of 1663 forbidding ' outed '
ministers to hold ' Conventicles,' re-enacted in 1670 with
the death penalty attached to it, is the mainspring of
the persecution. Now a Conventicle, i.e. an assembly
for public worship in some place other than a parish
church, sounds a very harmless thing ; but a Scottish
Conventicle of the reign of Charles II. or James VII.
came to mean an assembly of many hundreds of armed
peasants, with their wives, gathered from perhaps
thirty or forty parishes, on some remote Galloway
moor, listening from sunrise to sunset to some Ephraim
Macbriar or Habakkuk Mucklewrath, as he lifted
up hands that had born fetters in testimony for the
broken Covenant, which had been the marriage garment
of the Bride of Christ, and denounced as bloody Doegs
and Agags not only King and Council, but every
Christian who did not rise in rebellion against them.
236 THE INDULGENCE
The listeners might, indeed, as Cuddie Headrigg did,
' catch a gude fit o' the batts wi' sitting amang the
wat moss-hags for four hours at a yoking ' ; but they
caught flame in their hearts, and were ready for any
deed of violence. It was such meetings as these which
inspired the first outbreak in the Glenkens in 1666,
when a band of insurgents occupied Dumfries, grew to
the number of 2,000 before they got to Lanark, but
were routed at Rullion Green by General Dalyell ;
thirty-five persons were executed, and many more im-
prisoned in uncomfortable places like the Bass Rock.
The Government answered on the one hand with a
much stiffer Act of Supremacy over the Church, and
on the other with the first Declaration of Indulgence,
of which one hundred and twenty of the less extreme
Covenanters took advantage. An ' indulged ' minister
was not asked to be reordained, to own the lawfulness
of Episcopacy, or even to renounce the Covenant ; he
was merely to allow the Bishop to admit him to
his church, and to give security that he would pray
for the King and hold his tongue on politics. The
remnant who refused this naturally became fiercer
than ever; ' Laodiceans,' ' Achitophels,' ' Esaus,' 'dumb
dogs who bark not,' were the least words that the
carnal compliers with the ' Black Indulgence ' got from
the field preachers. Many of the Bishops, even the
better ones, liked the Indulgence very little ; it seemed
an abandonment of principle, as indeed it was ; and,
so hard is it for any Scot to be an Erastian, they
liked the new Act of Supremacy even less. Lauderdale,
with horrid glee, actually kicked out a remonstrating
Archbishop of Glasgow and put Leighton in his place.
Leighton \rent to the most Covenanting diocese in
THE RISING OF 1679 237
Scotland and tried, in the true spirit of an Apostle, to
evangelize it ; but his health broke down in the effort,
and he retired to end his days in Sussex. When he was
gone, 1675, the search for Conventicles became more
stringent. Soldiers were quartered on Galloway lairds,
who, though seldom extreme Covenanters, felt for their
tenants with the kindly feeling of those days. In *yy
Lauderdale actually sent several thousand Highlanders
into that district at free quarter, and it shows how
utterly contemptuous he was of the feelings of his
opponents. No act of personal violence is proved
against these amiable savages, but when they went
home again early in 'y8, they naturally turned their
hereditary skill in cattle-driving to its best account.
All that bad year there were two conflicting reigns of
terror in Galloway ; and in May, '79, when the fanatics
at last, after many attempts, ' got ' the Archbishop of
St. Andrews, the storm burst.
The Covenanting standard, blue and red, with ' No
quarter to the enemies of the Covenant ' on it, was raised
by Sharp's red-hand murderers at Rutherglen near
Glasgow, and thousands rallied to it. Claverhouse, who
was Conventicle-hunting in that region, got more than
he bargained for, some two hundred of his men being
put to flight at Drumclog. Glasgow fell, and Edinburgh
began to feel uncomfortable. Happily the insurgents
spent so much time in quoting texts for and against the
lawfulness of religious murder and other high points of
Covenant theology, that the Government was able to
get troops from England under the Duke of Monmouth.
Still the insurgents were nearly three to one when they
at last marched to meet Monmouth at Bothwell Brigg,
between Glasgow and Hamilton. They there threw
238 THE DUKE OF YORK IN SCOTLAND, 1680-81
away an impregnably strong position, and made no
fight at all ; most of their horse escaped, but their
foot were cut down in hundreds in the pursuit. The
vengeance of the Government even then was mild ;
some seven were hanged and some 250 banished or
imprisoned.
Richard Cameron — hence the title ' Cameronians,'
applied to extreme Covenanters down to the middle of
the Eighteenth Century — and Donald Cargill kept the
flame of resistance alight till they too were caught and
killed ; they had just published, at Queensferry and at
Sanquhar, declarations excommunicating the King and
the Duke of York and ' delivering them over to Satan.'
But only one of Sharp's murderers could ever be
caught ; and, immediately after Bothwell Brigg, Govern-
ment published a fresh Declaration of Indulgence,
allowing Nonconformists to preach in private houses
provided they abstained from doing so in the fields.
Let me suggest to the reader to keep in mind the
contemporary thread of English politics — the year of
Bothwell Brigg is the year of the first ' Exclusion Bill '
fuss, a fuss that brought with it the first two visits,
1680 and 1681, of the Duke of York, now openly a
Papist, to Scotland. It says much for the peacefulness
and loyalty of the North (always excepting those
terrible fellows in Galloway) that, when James' life
was hardly safe in England, he could be so very
well received, as he was, by all classes in Edinburgh.
He held a Parliament in 1681, and perhaps the absurd
Test Act that it passed was a compromise between
his wishes and those of loyal Protestant Episcopal
Scotland. All persons holding civil office or ecclesi-
astical preferment were to swear (a) that they held
SCOTTISH EXILES IN HOLLAND 239
the confession of faith of 1560 (i.e. of John Knox),
(b) that they upheld the royal supremacy over the
Church (shade of John Knox !), (c) that they renounced
the Covenant and the doctrine of resistance. This was
really much the worst thing that the Scots Parlia-
ment did between 1660 and 1689. So much did the
best of the Episcopal clergy dislike it that eighty of
them resigned their livings ; and naturally it did the
Government no good with the other side.
Now stepped forward the Earl of Argyll, son of
1 Gillespie Grumach ' ; as Lord Lome he had fought by
Charles' side at Worcester, he had been the friend of
Lauderdale and a persecutor of Covenanters ; and he
now protested against the Test ; he would take ' part of
it, not all.' Suddenly his enemies fell upon him — the
family feud blazed up again, and foolish James fanned
it ; rivers of blood lay between the House of Campbell
and the Houses of Ogilvy and Graham. Argyll was
indicted for treason, condemned on ludicrous evidence,
and fled to Holland. King Charles did not approve of
this, and would certainly have pardoned Argyll had
he not fled. An abler man than Argyll was driven in
1683 into Dutch exile, Sir James Dalrymple of Stair,
the great Whig lawyer, over whose family hung already
the curse of the Bride of Lammermoor and was to hang
the curse of Glencoe. And so on Dutch soil the seeds
of resistance began to germinate ; in England it was
the year of the Rye House Plot. Plots were, in fact,
in the air in both countries, and the Scots Privy Council
occasionally seized and tortured an agent, 1 among them
1 Torture was still legal in Scotland and was occasionally used
by both parties till 1709, when an Act of the United Parliament
abolished it.
240 ACCESSION OF JAMES VII.
good William Carstairs, afterwards leader of the
Moderate Presbyterians and Whig Principal of Edin-
burgh University. When Ren wick, a young Xameronian'
minister lately come from Holland, posted up all over
the West a declaration calling on God's people to rise
and slay the enemies of God, ' especially the bloody
soldiers and viperous Bishops and curates,' the Council
replied with a fierce edict, by which all who refused to
abjure Ren wick's declaration were to be shot at sight.
It is then that the true * killing times ' begin, and that
the cruelties attributed to Claverhouse did, or did not
take place. That Claverhouse shot at sight rebels
found with arms concealed in their homes, if they
refused to take the Test, is undoubted : the famous
John Brown, shot before his wife's eyes, was such a
rebel. There is a well-known story of two women being
drowned at Wigton, which is possibly true, although
grave doubts have been thrown upon it ; two women
had, however, been hanged in Edinburgh in 1681.
Even if the ' killing time ' be extended from Rullion
Green to the Revolution (1666-89), tne tota ^ number
of authenticated ' Martyrs ' does not exceed the number
of Jacobites executed by the English Government in
the single year 1746.
James visited Scotland again in 1684, and, though
good Queen Mary Beatrice was, no doubt, a welcome
change as head of Edinburgh society from Lauderdale's
wicked wife, the Tory Ministers who continued Lauder-
dale's policy were not much to boast of — the most
notorious being James Drummond, Earl of Perth, who
turned Papist to please his master.
That fatal master became King as James VII. in
February, 1685, and his Scots Parliament was as loyal
JAMES' FOLLY 241
as his English. But in the North, as in the South, "Att)
had blinded him. His loyal Parliament passed fresh
laws against Conventiclers and those who harboured
them, threatening with death all who ' rabbled ' con-
forming ministers, but refused to pass any serious
measure for the relief of Catholics ; and on this and
this alone the King's heart was set. Argyll's rising
in 1685 was little more than the last rumbling of the
old Rye House Plot, several of the agents of which,
as well as some of Sharp's murderers, were among the
poor three hundred who accompanied the Earl to
Scotland. Argyll in fact was no politician ; his previous
life had been excessively unstable, and he could not
command even the allegiance of all his own Campbells.
Worse than this, he had refused all combination with
Monmouth, though both his and Monmouth's move-
ments were financed and equipped in Holland. He
tried the Orkneys, whence warning was sent to the
Government, then tried the Clyde, and, after wandering
aimlessly about, was captured in disguise and beheaded
without fresh trial on the old charge.
James meanwhile was rushing headlong to his ruin ;
he filled his Privy Council with Papists, issued a general
Declaration of Indulgence to all Nonconformists, put
Jesuits into Holyrood Chapel, deprived a Bishop and an
Archbishop for remonstrating against this desecration,
and generally showed himself stark mad. Whatever
the Bishops might think, these proceedings were too
much for the Scottish laity ; gentle and simple alike
preferred almost anything to Popery. The last ' Martyr
of the Covenant,' Ren wick, hanged in the Grassmarket
in February, 1688, met with a sympathy that the Edin-
burgh mob had shown to no others of that gang. And,
vol. in 16
242 THE REVOLUTION OF 1689
when William landed in Torbay, although no outbreak
took place till James had fled, Scotland was more ripe
for revolt than England. In vain Lord Balcarres offered
to raise in Scotland a loyal militia to overawe the North
of England ; James, or Perth for him, preferred to send
Claverhouse and his 3,000 regular troops to join his
Army in the South, and this left Scotland without a single
royal soldier. The Scots Privy Council was powerless,
the Edinburgh mob rose in December, sacked Holyrood,
and slaughtered its defenders. Galloway was already
aflame, and, before the end of November, two hundred
Episcopalian ministers were fleeing for their lives.
Claverhouse (just created Viscount Dundee) and Bal-
carres had met James in London, and implored him to
throw himself upon the loyalty of Scotland, but either it
was too late or the hero of Solebay had become a coward.
When he had fled to France, a party of Scots Peers,
led by Hamilton, asked William to call a Scottish, as
he had called an English Convention. In this body,
which met in Edinburgh under the anti-papist reign of
terror, few Jacobites had anything to say ; indeed,
there was nothing for any one to say for James. The
great Tory nobles, Hamilton, Atholl, Queensberry, were
beginning to slip over to the Whig side, though a few
cannon-shot from the Duke of Gordon, who held the
Castle, might have stiffened their backs. The younger
Dalrymple pulled the Whig wires with the utmost skill,
and Dundee, who would never recognize a Whig King,
concluded that there was nothing to be done but to raise
the Highlands for his graceless, spiritless master. He
rode out of Edinburgh with a handful of horse, and,
when he was gone, there entered Mackay with four
regiments of Scots-Dutch, who proceeded further to
THE NON-JURORS 243
seize Stirling Castle. Then the few Jacobites who
remained in the Convention melted away, and the
brave, if ' bluidy ' Mackenzie was one of the only
four who voted against the motion by which James
was declared to have forfeited the Crown, April 4th,
1689. A week later William and Mary were proclaimed
at the Cross.
Meanwhile the poor despised Scottish Bishops, who
had writhed under the Erastian tyranny of Lauderdale
almost as much as the Covenanters whom they were
supposed to be persecuting, showed themselves to be
of sterner stuff than the lay nobles. The Bishop of
Edinburgh went as their deputy to London, to express
their unfaltering loyalty to King James and to concert
measures with Sancroft and the other English Bishops.
Sancroft had little to recommend but ' passive obedi-
ence ' ; more worldly advisers told the good man to
save his Church by recognizing William. William would,
in fact, fain have saved the Episcopal Church, which
had now on its side, as he knew, a large majority of the
upper classes of Scotland. But, without a shadow of
hesitation, the Fathers of that Church elected to go
out into the wilderness and become Non- Jurors. And
Non-Jurors they practically remained till long after the
1 'Forty-five.' It was a bitter proof to William, and one
of the first, that he could only be King of a faction.
And so into the ' Claim of Right,' drawn up by the Scots
Convention in imitation of the English ' Declaration of
Right,' a clause had to be inserted that ' Prelacy is and
has been an insupportable grievance to this Nation ' ;
and the Convention added that all ministers must take
the oath of allegiance to William and Mary or vacate
their manses. In July, '89, an Act of the Convention,
244 DUNDEE IN THE HIGHLANDS, 1690
now turned into a Parliament, laid down that the
Sovereigns were to settle Church Government ' in
the way most agreeable to the interests of the people
of Scotland ' ; had a plebiscite been fairly taken,
this ' way ' would have been found to be moderate
Episcopacy.
Among the humours of the situation we may note that
the Presbyterians here gave themselves away, for once,
to that wicked man Erastus. They actually asked the
State to prescribe a Church for them ; in other words,
the religious revolution was a mere Whig triumph, a
triumph of the trading classes in the burghs over the
landed gentry, while the mass of the nobles stood luke-
warm or aloof ; religious passions had avowedly become
mere political ones.
Meanwhile, in March, '90, Dundee in the Highlands
received a commission from James, and rewards were
offered for his head. Mackay and he marched and
countermarched against each other, while beating up
recruits, and each was badly enough supported by the
master for whom he was fighting. At last their Armies
met just South of Blair Castle, which bars the Great
North Road, in the fierce battle of Killiecrankie, where,
with the loss of their heroic leader and nearly one-third
of their force, the Jacobites obtained a barren triumph.
In the rest of the campaign Mackay, a shrewd and brave
veteran, had the best of it, and the desperate valour of
the newly raised ' Cameronian ' regiment under Cleland
drove the Highland Army back from the unfortified
village of Dunkeld ; this practically ended the war.
The disarmament of the ' insurgents,' most of whom
had dispersed after Dundee's fall, was a more difficult
matter. William, it must be remembered, had still on
THE JACOBITE CLANS 245
his hands the unfinished Irish campaign, and a huge war
with France, and so was able to pay very little attention
to Scotland ; the only agents whom he could trust were
bitter Whigs, like the Dalrymples, thirsting for Tory
blood, while he was obliged to pretend to trust noblemen
whom he knew to be intriguing with his rival. Mackay
did his best ; he built at the foot of Ben Nevis a fortress,
whose site still bears the name of the King who was a
Whig against his will, and posted a regiment there to
keep order. Something was tried through Lord Breadal-
bane in the way of ' satisfying with money ' Chiefs who
would ' come in ' to the Government, but without much
success ; finally the plan was adopted of fixing a date
(January 1st, 1692) before which all Chiefs must take
the oath of allegiance, or .
The alternative was ' letters of fire and sword/ a
policy difficult to execute in a wild country with the
few troops Government could command. But John
Dalrymple, son of Sir James, now Viscount Stair, was in
William's confidence, and he unquestionably intended
to use the proclamation against the Clans most obnoxious
to himself, and was very much disappointed when he
learned that, hopeless of finding a successor to Dundee,
the leading clansmen were rapidly taking the oath.
At the end of 1691 but two Macdonalds remained un-
sworn, Glengarry, who was holding out in arms, and old
Glencoe, head of a small Clan in an isolated valley, which
could easily be barred at either end. John Dalrymple's
spirits rose when he learned that, in consequence of
deep snow, Glencoe had reached Inverary, in order to
swear allegiance, too late to obtain the benefit of the
proclamation (January 6th). Ten days later William
in Flanders signed, perhaps unread, an order for the
246 THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE, 1692
extermination of Glencoe and all his tribe. Dalrymple
at once sent word to the Governor of Fort William to
execute this order. The letter which he wrote is extant,
and was sold by public auction a few weeks before these
words were written. It is a bloody letter ; all under
seventy years of age are to be slain. The Campbell
(of Glenlyon) to whom the job was entrusted made it
worse by entering the glen in peaceful guise, asking and
receiving hospitality from his intended victims. At
5 a.m. on February 13th he gave the order to fall on.
Even then, seeing that we had become a little more
humane since Argyll's great days, and that there was no
Covenanting minister present to urge on ' the bonny
wark,' only some thirty persons were killed ; the rest,
including Glencoe's son, escaped. William, with the
weight of Europe on his invalid shoulders, thought
little of it, and the news only leaked out gradually ;
there was no Milton to cry ' Avenge, oh Lord ! ' The
Scottish Parliament, however, demanded an inquiry,
and a report was afterwards drawn up which exonerated
the King, but demanded the punishment of Dalrymple
and several subordinates. It seems to me that William
acted honourably in refusing to do more than dismiss
Dalrymple from office, for he thus tacitly took the blame
to his taciturn self. The verdict of posterity has not
acquitted and cannot acquit him.
The Church settlement was, after all, a more serious
matter, and William gave way far too readily to the
victorious political faction. His chief adviser was
William Carstairs, who had suffered torture for the
cause without losing all his moderation, but who found
himself quite unable to procure any toleration for
Episcopacy, when once the General Assembly of the
SETTLEMENT OF THE KIRK 247
Kirk had been allowed to meet. The Scottish Parlia-
ment, indeed, was now intent upon another set of griev-
ances, and left the details of the religious settlement to
the Assembly itself. But it repealed the Supremacy
Act of 1669, though not that of 1661 ; it abolished
patronage, it declared the Westminster Confession to
be the faith of Scotland, and it restored to their parishes
some sixty of the survivors of 1661, henceforward called
* the Antediluvians.' But it made no mention of the
Covenant, and it took away all civil penalties from
excommunication.
It was cruel to entrust these ' Antediluvians,' who at
once dominated the General Assembly, with the final
settlement. They were burning for vengeance, and
barely tolerated the seventy-six survivors of the ' In-
dulged ' ministers who sat beside them. Many moderates
from among the ' piskies ' would have come in, but
every one who had been ordained by a Bishop was
contemptuously rejected. The result was that, in order
to fill the vacant parishes, candidates very slenderly
qualified with learning had to be ordained. Learning
was, in fact, disestablished and dethroned for a whole
generation ; nearly all the University Professors were
' outed.' Moreover, whole districts in the North and
East of Scotland absolutely refused to submit to the
change ; newly appointed Presbyterian ministers were
kept by force from taking possession, and flocks rallied
round their Episcopalian ministers in devout though
unseemly riots. Twenty years later there were still
one hundred and sixty-five ' piskies ' in possession of
their manses in defiance of the law. An ' Oath of
Assurance ' imposed by Parliament on all ministers
in 1693, to the effect that William and Mary were
248 COMMERCIAL GRIEVANCES
King and Queen de jure as well as de facto, did not
add to the peace of Kirk or State ; while, on the other
side, there was a fierce Cameronian remnant refusing
all oaths to any King or Kirk which did not impose
the Covenant on every living soul. In short, the only
good thing done in the reign was the re-enactment in
1696 of a law of Charles I., to the effect that a school
and schoolmaster were to be maintained by the heritors
in every parish in Scotland.
We must now go back and trace briefly the causes
other than religious which had made and were making
Scotland unhappy. The commercial grievances dated
from the exclusion of Scotland from the benefits of the
English Navigation Act, if not from the Union of the
Crowns itself. The Scots Parliament did, indeed, pass
a Navigation Act of its own at the beginning of the
reign, and did impose heavy duties upon certain imports
from England and Ireland ; but, in the face of English
jealousy, it had little means of enforcing its wishes,
and the Scottish Kings were plainly told by their English
Parliaments that Scottish competition would not be
tolerated. Moreover, the Parliament at Edinburgh was
not in any real sense free, being dominated by the
Crown Committee of ' Lords of the Articles.' It was,
perhaps, this condition of affairs which led Charles II.
to push on, in spite of Lauderdale's secret resistance,
a scheme for a United Parliament ; and when this failed
(1669), to touch with the sceptre a great Scottish Act
of 1681, heavily protecting a great number of nascent
Scottish manufactures. By the date of the Revolution
the constitutional spirit of the poor and proud country
was definitely awake, and achieved a great triumph
when, in 1690, after a year's debate, the Lords of the
THE DARIEN SCHEME 249
Articles were for ever abolished. Scotland had at last
got some real means of making its wishes known ; and
the Government at once found itself face to face with
a highly discontented Nation. William's Commissioners,
who presided in Scottish Parliaments, had a sore task,
for, though most of the honest Jacobites were in prison
and remained there, there were few of the leading nobles
who did not have an intrigue with the exiled Court.
Not all of these were necessarily * such a parcel of rogues
in a Nation ' as Burns afterwards thought them to be.
Some of them said to themselves, ' Well, if we've got
to be Whigs, we may at least be rich, as riches and
Whiggery seem to go together.' And this attitude was
stimulated by the six years of starvation, 1 696-1 702,
from which the country suffered. So great was then
the famine that the Privy Council was obliged, like
any French Revolutionist, to fix a maximum price for
wheat and oatmeal ; the ' Causes of God's Wrath ' were
indeed manifest, and Cameronian ranters did not spare
to refer to them.
It was, as we know, an age of speculation, an age in
which people believed they could create markets and
manufactures by Acts of Parliament, an age of paper
money. The Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695.
An East India Company was established in the next
year, for pushing the products of Scottish industries
wherever an opening could be found, and such capital
as there was in Scotland was largely invested in its
shares. William Paterson, a Lowland Scot, who had
already projected the Bank of England, conceived the
idea of including in the enterprises of this Company
the foundation of a Scottish Colony at Darien, on the
Isthmus of Panama. There was, as there still is, a fine
250 FAILURE OF THE DARIEN SCHEME
vagueness about the name ' Panama ' ; it smelt of gold
and Spaniards. Our French friends have in recent
years invented the verb panamiser (= to get up a
swindle) . Something like a quarter of a million, perhaps
then half the available capital of Scotland, was sunk
in the job. Scotsmen forgot that they had no fine
manufactures to send to India or to Panama, no merchant
ships to send them in, no Fleet to protect any merchant
ships they might hire ; above all, they forgot the intense
jealousy of their Southern neighbours. And William,
whose heart was either among his Dutch tulip-beds or
in the first line of some desperate battle in Flanders,
carelessly promised to suspend the English Navigation
Act for ten years and to protect with the English Fleet
all Scottish ships engaged in foreign trade — and that at
the very time when it was most important to his European
policy to conciliate the Spaniards by every means in
his power. Of course the English Parliament laughed
in his face, and asked him for what purpose he supposed
himself to have become King of England ? He was
obliged to eat his words, and English and Spaniards joined
hands to burst the pitiful bubble. Three expeditions,
each duly accompanied by Presbyterian Ministers, Elders
and stools of repentance, sailed to Darien in 1698-9,
laden with heavy serges, tweeds, Kilmarnock bonnets,
and other articles suitable to the bitter climate of tropical
America ; those who landed endured fearful sufferings,
starvation, Spanish prisons, internal dissensions, and
found barely even a pirate to trade with. The result
was the temporary ruin of the nascent Scottish
Commerce.
From the failure of this scheme it became plain to all
reflective Scots that but two courses were open to their
INDEPENDENT SPIRIT OF SCOTLAND 251
country : separation from, or a commercial and political
Union with England. Let us pause for a moment and
see what Scotland had to ask and to offer in the latter
case if England were to divert her from wilfully seeking
her own salvation.
She was a country with a population of about a
million — say one-fifth of that of England ; with a Re-
venue one-thirty-fifth, with Customs one-forty-eighth
those of England ; with a currency of about half a
million, whose standard pound, shilling and penny stood
to the English pound, shilling and penny as twelve
stands to one ; ■ with an agriculture entirely mediaeval
and communal. Meat was half the price of wheat-
bread, for the Highlanders did at least produce, sell
and then steal back some sort of scraggy black cattle ;
these, like the sheep, were always cooped up in winter.
There were a few little struggling manufactures of
linen and woollen goods on the East coast. There was
no timber trade, for in the Lowlands there were no
trees ; and there were no ships. Rents, wages and
prices had been stationary or going back for half a
century. If the Scottish system of Jurisprudence was
superior to, it was also profoundly alien from the
English. The Scottish nobility, famous for its turbu-
lence and its treachery, had just stepped into possession
of a Parliamentary system which it intended to work
for its own benefit. The Scottish Kirk, though not
legally independent of the State, was in spirit wholly
bent on dominating the State, and was utterly hostile to
all progress, all intellect, all free thought ; it lived by
denouncing the form of Church government established
in England, and by persecuting those of its countrymen
1 A ' Pound Scots ' = 1*5 of an English pound sterling.
252 COMMISSIONERS FOR UNION, 1702
who adhered to the English form. Finally, there was a
numerous, powerful and recently beaten faction, both in
Church and State, burning for revenge. And a Scotland
thus ruined and soured by a century of neglect, civil
war, faction and poverty, had to ask of England a
Union on terms of equality !
You may well say, ' But what had Scotland to
threaten if her terms were refused ? ' Well, she held
one strong card. All her past greatness had lain in
open hostility to England, and in the old French
Alliance. Could she once find internal union again,
even the England of Marlborough would never be able
to conquer her. When in 1701 James II. and VII.
preceded his son-in-law King William to the grave,
Louis XIV., at the height of his power, the acknow-
ledged head of European civilization, ' behaved like a
gentleman,' ' and recognized the child of misfortune
as James III. and VIII. Just in proportion as that
recognition offended the national spirit of Englishmen,
it appealed to that of Scotsmen. For the English Act
of Settlement of 1700, providing that after the death
of Anne ' a wee, wee German lairdie should clap down
in our gude man's chair,' had been passed without
consulting Scotland at all.
England, then girding itself to avenge Louis' insult to
itself in the biggest war it had waged since the Fifteenth
Century, would be willing to pay almost any price to
avert a French- Jacobite landing in Scotland. So
William's last and Anne's first acts were to recommend
to the English Parliament an incorporating Union
with Scotland.
Commissioners to treat of this were in fact nominated
1 But see above, p. 107.
THE LAST SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT, 1703 253
in Anne's first- month. But the Scottish Nation, Whig
and Tory alike, took fire at once. Anne had very natur-
ally suggested that, as Presbyterians were tolerated in
England, ' piskies ' might receive equal treatment in the
North, and this was quite enough to set the Kirk ' blawin '
and ' bleezin.' Could the Jacobites have utilized this
irregular energy ? Some attempts they indeed made,
one as late as the autumn of 1706, to unite with the
Cameronian remnant in the name of King James ; armed
Highlanders were observed dropping by twos and threes
into Edinburgh. But they had no leader. Their figure-
head, the fourth Duke of Hamilton, was a liar and coward
who betrayed every cause. Lockhart of Carnwath, the
only honest Jacobite who served on the final Commission
of Union, was not of sufficient weight in the State. The
ablest living Scot, Mr. Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun,
with his deep learning, his Odyssean experience of men
and cities, and his lofty patriotism, was an aristocratic
Republican of the old Roman type. On the other side
stood the ' first Tory who turned Whig ' at the Revolution,
the Duke of Queensberry, pliant and able, unscrupulous
and courteous ; he was the real engineer of the Union ;
then there was the Chancellor Seafield, a turncoat too
and a cynic, but a man of real ability and utter fearless-
ness; best of all, there was young John of Lome, who
became in 1703 second Duke of Argyll, Jeanie Deans'
Duke, a brave soldier, a convinced and honourable
Whig and yet a true patriot. Carstairs could be trusted,
if not to muzzle the Kirk at least to prevent it from
biting too hard.
Yet when the last Scottish Parliament met in May,
1703, it seemed as if the forces of disruption would win,
and the next four years were full of stormy contradictions
254 THE UNION, 1707
in Church and State, during which the Edinburgh mob
broke the windows of Unionists and threw stones at
Ministers with a good deal of spontaneous patriotism.
Acts were introduced called ' Acts of Security ' : our
Successor on the death of Queen Anne shall not be
the same as the English Successor, unless we get full
security for our Parliament, Religion, Trade, Colonies (!)
and Sovereignty. ' Limitations ' of the prerogative of
the said Successor were also introduced by Mr. Fletcher.
England put on the screw by Bills excluding all Scottish
products and making all Scots ' aliens ' in England.
The final set of Commissioners to draw up a Treaty
of Union, thirty-one on each side, was nominated in
1705, Scotland consenting by a bare majority of two
votes. Marlborough's victorious career quickened the
steps of these gentlemen, and in April,' 1706, they
had come to an agreement on the main principles,
viz. free trade and a single Parliament. The details
took time, but in the details it is England on the
whole that gives and Scotland that receives. In the
adjustment of taxation Scotland is to be exempted
from many English taxes, because she ought to bear
no share in paying the interest of the English National
Debt. Our bankrupt East India Company is bought
out, and a sum of money paid in compensation to
holders of Darien stock. Our share in the United Par-
liament is to be greater than our wealth, though less
than our population would warrant, to wit forty-five
Commoners and sixteen Peers — the latter elected for
each Parliament by all the Peers of Scotland. Our Laws
and our Law-courts we are to retain, without appeal
to English Law-courts. Our Saltire, commonly called
St. Andrew's Cross, is to be quartered on the flag of
'AN END OF AN AULD SANG' 255
* Great Britain,' and to be borne after Anne's death by
the Princess Sophia and her heirs being Protestants.
The terrible question of Religion was not mentioned in
the draft of the Treaty presented in October, 1706, to
the Scottish Parliament, which promptly insisted that
complete security for the supremacy of the Kirk should
be inserted not only in the Treaty but in the coronation
oath also. Storm after storm rang through the walls
of the old Parliament House, to the accompaniment of
crashing windows and yelling mobs up and down the
High Street and the Canongate ; but Queensberry's
tact and majority were equal to it all, and, when the
Treaty of Union had been touched with the sceptre on
January 16th, 170-7, Lord Seafield locked the door of
the House as he left it, with the bitter jest, " There's
an end of an auld sang."
" Deil rax their thrapples that reft us o' 't," as Andrew
Fairservice remarks ; and fancy loves to linger over the
' Riding of the Scots Parliament ' in procession up the
stately street (cleaned for the occasion) from Holyrood
House. May not a political philosopher also pause, and
ask whether something in the nature of a Federal Union
might not have been tried ? It is the fashion to dismiss
such schemes as ' whimsies,' partly because ' Home
Rule ' in the vulgar modern sense is merely the cry of
self-seeking demagogues, partly no doubt because of the
astonishing success of the United Parliament up to 1832
in making Great Britain the foremost Nation in the
World. But is not the supremacy of a single House of
Parliament just now the greatest of political dangers ?
Might not a Federal Council, which would ex natura rerum
ultimately have included Ireland and the Colonies,
have been equally successful as Empire-builder ? Might
256 RESULTS OF THE UNION
not a Federal Constitution have ultimately given us the
very thing of which we now stand most in need, a
bulwark against the unchecked supremacy of the
uneducated classes ?
That the Union should be unpopular in Edinburgh
goes without saying ; that Glasgow, then a town of 12,000
inhabitants, went solid against, it only seems surprising
because we are apt to forget that it was not till thirty
years after the measure that Glasgow seriously took
part in the Colonial trade. There and everywhere else
in Scotland the first results were the deaths of the infant
industries, which had been so highly protected by the
Act of 1681. In fact only the cattle trade benefited
from the first ; Rob Roy began to combine with his
natural profession of cattle thief that of a drover.
Louis XIV., who had been very hard hit at Ramillies
in May, 1706, had missed his best chance, but the
Jacobites kept him stirring all the next year, and in
the spring of 1708 a small French Fleet, with King Jamie
on board, sailed from Dunkirk : but when it appeared
off the East coast of Scotland there was Admiral Byng
waiting for it, and it never even attempted a landing.
Yet hatred of the Union grew apace. In the last half
of Anne's reign many of the prophecies of Scottish
patriots were fulfilled. The barbarous English law of
treason was extended to Scotland, and ' traitors ' might
now be (and were) removed for trial into England.
Legal toleration was established for such of the ' piskies '
(they were very few) as would abjure King James and
pray for Queen Anne ; the patronage of Scottish livings,
abolished 1649, restored 1661, abolished 1690, was now
again restored to the lay proprietors : which of the two
latter measures inflamed the wrath of the Kirk the more,
THE JACOBITES' KING 257
it would be hard to say. An attempt of 1713 to extend,
in the teeth of the words of the Union-Treaty, the malt-
tax to Scotland x almost produced a civil war ; it did
produce a motion in the House of Lords for the repeal
of the Union, moved by Argyll himself, and supported
by all Scottish Peers and many English Whig Peers,
who wanted to tease a Tory Government. This motion
was lost by only four votes.
' Repeal of the Union ' was the most popular cry
in Scotland for nearly a generation after its passing.
But if the only hope of this lies in accepting a Papist
King ? Then, Heaven help us, our hearts will indeed
be torn in half !
King Jamie was by this time twenty-five years of
age, and the very worst possible head to conceive or
to carry out a ' state-stroke.' His virtues, which were
many, told more fatally against him than his vices,
which vanish under the historical microscope. He has
had hard measure in history and in fiction — nowhere
harder or more unjust than in ' Esmond.' He was
brave in battle, as he proved abundantly, on the
French side, in Marlborough's wars ; he was the soul
of honour both in private life and in public, utterly
refusing to barter his faith for three kingdoms, refusing
even to hold out any diplomatic hope that he would
do so — an attitude which exasperated even his most
faithful friends. Yet he was quite free from intoler-
ance ; he promised full toleration for the several
versions of the Christian religion to which his subjects
professed to be attached ; he kept Protestants in high
favour at his exiled Court, and, when the Pope re-
1 This was actually done in 1725, and the disastrous result was
the substitution of whisky for ale as the national drink.
VOL. Ill 17
258 CHANCES FOR JAMES, 1715
monstrated with him for doing so, told that gentleman
that he was a King and not an Apostle ; he even gave
his son a Protestant tutor. In an age of immoral kings
his life was pure. But against all this you must set the
fact that he entirely lacked both enterprise and resolu-
tion, that the slightest mishap discouraged him ; he
was the ' child of misfortune,' and misfortune had
entered into his soul. Though fairly well educated, he
was not clever, and, while his kindness of heart led him
to go on trusting men whom he should have known
for traitors, his knowledge that there was treachery
about him sometimes made him untrustful of those to
whom he should have given his confidence.
But when Anne died, a year before old Louis, an
insurrection on behalf of James was certain, in Scotland
if not in England. On paper the ' 'Fifteen,' as this in-
surrection is always called, had better chances than its
descendant thirty years later. It had, however, many
subsidiary faults and one radical one ; it ought to have
been the ' 'Fourteen.' Anne's last Minister, Bolingbroke,
had actually been preparing in the last week of the
Queen's life for a peaceable succession of James, and
James ought to have been in Scotland before George (who
didn't hurry) had time to lumber across into England.
But the movement was deferred for a whole year. Even
then the chances were not bad. The Regent of France
was not unfavourable ; the warlike King of Sweden,
Charles XII., had his own reasons for being cross with
King George, and so had the King of Spain ; one of the
greatest living soldiers, the Duke of Berwick, Marshal
of France, was James' half-brother ; one of the most
astute politicians, Bolingbroke, had just fled from
England and had become his Secretary. Ormond, who
THE RISING OF 1715 259
succeeded Marlborough as Commander-in-Chief in Eng-
land, 1712, was an avowed Jacobite and had begun to
promote officers of his own opinions ; true, Marlborough
had again on Anne's death replaced Ormond, but he
was personally a waverer and had no influence, even of
a military kind, in the councils of King George. There
were not 15,000 troops with the colours in Britain, and
of these not 2,000 in Scotland, it being the singular
habit of John Bull at the close of all his great wars to
disband his best soldiers as if they would never be needed
again ; it was now to become his still more singular
habit to buy Dutch or German troops to defend his
Island for him.
The councils of the Jacobites were, however, fatally
divided : James distrusted Berwick ; Bolingbroke got
drunk and blabbed secrets ; Ormond, finding himself
suspected, fled too soon to France. If on the military
side the Hanoverian Government was incapable, on the
civil side it was preternaturally acute : the Whig Earl
of Stair had his spies all over Europe ; the Whig soldier
Stanhope was one of the best Secretaries of State
England ever had, and the Whig Duke of Argyll, honoured
and loved in Scotland as few Whigs were and fewer
deserved to be, was himself worth an Army. Swift
seizure was made of the notorious English Jacobites,
who certainly let themselves be seized very tamely :
and
The King to Oxford sent his troop of horse,
where (as is well known) ' Tories own no argument but
force.' A price of £100,000 was set on the head of
the ' Pretender ' (not a measure commonly employed in
civilized countries), and Stair with great sang-froid set
260 MISTAKES OF THE JACOBITES
paid murderers upon James' track both before and
after the outbreak.
It was John Erskine, Earl of Mar, a man who had
been and was to be again of doubtful fidelity, who on
September 6th, without waiting for express orders, set
up the standard of King James at Braemar, where he
soon found himself at the head of eight thousand High-
landers gleg for a fight. He had with him fifteen of the
leading Peers and Chiefs of great Clans in Scotland, and
practically all the fighting force of Camerons, Mac-
donalds and Stewarts. The Frasers, the largest of the
fighting Clans, were led the other way by the astute
Simon, Lord Lovat, who aspired to keep the balance in
the North, and who now seized Inverness and declared
for King George. Why did not King Jamie come ? It
was a fatal mistake to wait for supplies from France,
Sweden or Spain ; these countries would only be likely
to declare themselves for him after a success, not before
one. Meanwhile Argyll hurried to Stirling, took com-
mand of the few Government troops he could find, and
garrisoned with them the line of the Forth from Stirling
to Edinburgh. Mar ought instantly to have forced this
line at the ford just above Stirling ; instead of which
he concentrated at Perth and occupied the East coast
from Aberdeen to Fife, feebly squealing for his King
and for gunpowder — as if Highlanders needed powder —
without taking any steps to make the latter commodity.
Mr. Forster and Lord Derwentwater rose for the Cause
in Northumberland and joined hands with Lord Kenmure
who did the same in Galloway. Mar detached some
2,000 men under Mackintosh to join them ; between
them the Jacobite Armies outnumbered Argyll by four to
one, and ought instantly to have converged and crushed
END OF THE RISING 261
him. Instead of this, Forster marched Southwards
into Lancashire, dawdled his time away at Preston, and
then capitulated to an inferior force under General
Carpenter on November 12th. On the same day Mar,
who had at last advanced, met Argyll at Sheriff muir
on Allan Water, where
Some say that we wan and some say that they wan,
And some say that nane wan at a', man.
Each right wing, in fact, chased the opposing left from
the field, and Mar's right (his Highlanders) performed
their task in four minutes. But then Mar fell tamely
back on Perth, and so left the real victory with Argyll.
The Duke, now largely reinforced (Dutch mostly), began
to push his opponent into the sea ; he was censured in
London for doing it too slowly, the truth being that,
great and humane man as he was, he wished to give
time for the rising to fizzle out, and to give the gentlemen
engaged a chance to escape to the Continent. Hopes
of this were, however, much spoiled when James, too
late for all but honour, landed at Peterhead on De-
cember 22nd. The King's melancholy resignation only
added trouble to the hearts of his adherents, already
turned to water by the incapacity of their leader ;
James " cared not," says an eye-witness, " to come
abroad among our soldiers or to see us handle our arms "
— he who had charged at Oudenarde and Malplaquet in
Louis' finest Household Cavalry ! In less than six weeks
he had to embark again at Montrose, being barely a day
ahead of the Whigs, who were steadily reoccupying the
coast towns. The remnants of Mar's Army, long ago
thinned by incessant desertions, were hunted into fast-
nesses of Highlands and Islands by General Cadogan
262 THE CAUSE ALIVE
and the Dutch ; most of the Chiefs eventually escaped
abroad or made their peace. James took Mar with
him, retired to Avignon, and finally took up his quarters
at Rome. His last thought on Scottish soil seems to
have been bitter regret that his troops had been obliged
to destroy some crops and burn some cottages on their
retreat, and his last act was to send some of his slender
stock of money to relieve the sufferers. Some thirty
English and Scottish prisoners were executed in Lanca-
shire and in London — for no Scottish jury could have
been trusted to convict them. Like the Tory courtiers
in James II. 's reign, Whig courtiers had ' grants ' made
to them of prisoners, so that they might get ransoms
from them, and those prisoners who could not pay
were transported. Of the six Peers impeached in
London, Derwentwater and Kenmure alone were be-
headed, Nithsdale escaping in his wife's dress the day
before that fixed for his execution. Bribery was rife
in London, especially bribery to Hanoverian ' ladies.'
Lord Nairn, after eighteen months' imprisonment,
emerged a ruined man, and noted in his diary, " Paid
to lawyers and b s £1,500." The most startling
result of the rising was a fierce Act against the
Episcopalians in Scotland, for they had been almost
to a man for King James.
The Cause was, however, by no means dead. Though
France was for the next fifteen years practically an
ally of England, the Scottish Jacobites were soon
singing
Here's to the King o' Swede,
Fresh laurels crown his head,
Shame fa' ev'ry sneaking blade
That winna do 't again.
PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD 263
The death of Charles XII. at the end of 1718 having
shattered hopes from Sweden, they turned to Spain :
James actually visited Madrid, and in 1719 a few
Spanish troops were landed on the Inverness-shire coast,
together with George Keith, Earl Marischal, the Marquis
of Tullibardine, Lord Seaforth and Lord George Murray ;
they rallied a few clansmen and fought a battle, of about
one thousand a side, in Glenshiel, and were defeated
by General Wightman. More attainders naturally fol-
lowed ; it had served to keep the flame alight in the
Highlands, and that was all.
But Walpole's criminal indifference to the honour
and fortune of England allowed the Navy and Army to
rot and dwindle for twenty years ; he did, indeed, send
Marshal Wade into the Highlands to make a couple of
hundred miles of road and to build forts which he
omitted to garrison. Wade, a slow but shrewd man,
reported a circumstance which ought to have disquieted
King George, namely that the rents of the exiles of
the 'Fifteen and the 'Nineteen were being regularly
collected and sent to their rightful owners abroad.
Every one, in fact, knew perfectly well that the next
time England was drawn into a European spuilzie
of any sort, the Jacobites would rise for the White
Rose.
Meanwhile the White Rose had married in 1719 a
Polish lady, whose nerves and groundless jealousies
embittered all his middle life : Prince Charles was born
in 1720 and Prince Henry 1725. The former grew up
a tall, athletic, very naughty boy, badly educated and
indifferent to religion, but quite a clean liver. Jacobites
who were presented to him at Rome began to see that
here was a young man made to their hands : and
264 CHARLES EDWARD IN FRANCE, 1744
certainly, from his early boyhood, the Prince had the
Cause in his head to the exclusion of everything else ;
he went into training until he should be called upon to
lead it. When he was sixteen the Porteous Riot — really
an outbreak against the English Excise Laws — shook
Scotland from end to end, and the ' sorrowfu Union '
was, perhaps for the last time, publicly referred to as
the spring of all our woes. In the next year John Murray
of Broughton visited Rome, and became a close intimate
of the Prince : from 1741 he was organizing a regular
Association of Jacobites in each district of Scotland.
Negotiations were also begun with the well-affected
in England, who however avoided committing themselves
on paper. From the opening of '43 Louis XV. was
warmly favourable ; he was going to war with England
in Flanders and Germany, but, before he committed
himself to a landing, he naturally waited to see on what
help he could rely in the Island of Great Britain. In
the spring of '44 he thought the prospects favourable
enough to embark 10,000 troops at Dunkirk, with
Marshal Saxe, the best soldier in Europe, at their
head. They waited for escort from the Brest Fleet,
which sailed up Channel to Dungeness ; there it met
Admiral Norris with twenty-five sail of the line, and
before a shot could be exchanged, a storm drove the
French again to the Westward. The transports at
Dunkirk were therefore useless, and Louis abandoned
his plan of invasion.
On board that Dunkirk Fleet was Prince Charles. He
had slipped away North without telling his father, and
had travelled through France. James, though much
perturbed at this ' start/ had sent a Commission of
Regency after him. Louis had received him well, and
CHARLES EDWARD'S LANDING, 1745 265
had promised his assistance. Murray, who must have
known better, kept feeding him with hopes of risings,
and travelled to and fro between Scotland and France.
For a year and a half after the bitter disappointment of
the Dunkirk Fleet Charles stayed in Paris or in Northern
France in hopes of some fresh turn of the wheel. At
last he declared that he would go alone and throw
himself on the loyalty of Scotland. Two adventurous
Irishmen, Sheridan and Kelly, joined him : Tullibardine,
deprived of his succession to the Atholl Dukedom for
his share in the 'Nineteen, also came to him ; and in
June, '45, we find him negotiating, on borrowed money,
with a Mr. Walsh of Nantes for two ships and some
broadswords, powder and muskets. The battle of
Fontenoy had just been fought.
On July 23rd the piper of the Laird of Barra was
walking along the rocks of Isle Eriska, at the tail of the
Long Island, when he was hailed by an old acquaintance
in a boat which had just put off from a small French
ship. Such appearances were not rare, and probably
suggested to Donald's mind a keg or two of smuggled
brandy. He came aboard and piloted the vessel into the
little harbour of Eriska. Among those who landed was
a tall youth in a plain black coat, a plain shirt, not very
clean, and a fair round wig ; obviously a young clergy-
man who had heard much of the Highlanders and
wished to converse with them. His speech had an
Irish accent, but he quickly picked up a few words
of the Gaelic, especially the words used in drinking
of healths. On the next day the great man of Uist —
a Macdonald, of course — came to see and converse
with the young cleric, and advised him to go home, to
which the cleric replied, "I am come home, Sir, and
266 THE RISING OF 1745
I am persuaded that my faithful Highlanders will stand
by me."
Now the Chiefs whom Murray had ' organized ' during
the last four years had all rightly stipulated for sub-
stantial French aid as the one condition of a rising, and
they were therefore very much astonished when they
found that Charles, who crossed to the mainland near
Arisaig on the 25th, had only brought seven gentlemen
with him. All were in fact shocked at the rashness of
the enterprise, but the adhesion of the noble Cameron of
Lochiel decided the rest. We don't hear of any ' fiery
cross dipped in the blood of a newly slain goat ' being
sent round to summon the Clans, but the news travelled
with lightning rapidity and we can imagine the joy
with which it was received in many a Highland home,
how the pipers would strike up ' Cock o' the North,'
and how
Some gat them swords and some gat nane,
And some were dancing mad their lane,
And mony a vow o' weir was ta'en
That night at Amulree.
The bulk of the fighting Clans, Macdonalds, Camerons
and Stewarts of Appin came in at once ; these formed
the best part of Charles' Army, and were with him
throughout the campaign. The rendezvous was fixed
for August 19th at Glenfinnan, and a good omen was
acknowledged when some Macdonalds cut off two com-
panies of Whig foot on their way to Fort Augustus,
and brought them in triumph to see the Royal
Standard raised.
The Government had information of the start from
France, and put out the usual proclamation of a reward
for the ' Pretender's ' head (one-third the value of his
ADVANCE OF CHARLES 267
father's — a mere trifle of £30,000), and King George in
his speech to Parliament talked of it as an ' unnatural '
rebellion. As a matter of fact it was the most natural
consequence of the Government's own neglect of its
forces, as well as of its contemptuous treatment of Scot-
land. There were not 12,000 troops in Britain, of which
Sir John Cope had 4,000 in Scotland, all, except one
regiment, untried in war. After a short delay to collect
provisions Cope started North from Stirling with 1,500
foot, intending for Fort Augustus. But Charles had
the ' wind at his back/ his men marched two miles for
one of Cope's, and they beset the Pass of Corryarrick,
the critical place on the Great North Road. Cope
avoided the shock and turned aside to secure Inverness
and Aberdeen, whence he might, if necessary, ship his
troops round for the defence of Edinburgh.
It soon became obvious that this would be necessary.
Charles pushed on by Perth, picking up Atholl men,
Macphersons, Robertsons, with the Duke of Perth and
his brother Lord John, and Tullibardine's brother Lord
George Murray. Lord George was at once made Lieu-
tenant-General, and, being a man of real ability, who had
fought in the 'Fifteen and the 'Nineteen, he became
practically Commander-in-Chief. But he had been
pardoned after the latter fight, and till the very latest
moment he had been in council with Cope. This made
the Prince entertain a distrust of him which too often
became visible. Lord George, however, having decided
to join, was absolutely loyal ; he thoroughly understood
Highlanders, and was one of the best claymores in his
own Army.
Right on they went by Dunblane to the ford of Frew,
waded the Forth and shook their plaids at Stirling
268 BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS
Castle, which fired a few random shots at them. The
two regiments of Dragoons, which Cope had left to guard
the Forth, fell back before them in ever increasing panic.
By September 17th Charles was outside Edinburgh,
which was unfortified except for an old wall ; he sent a
summons to the town, and, while the bit Baillie bodies
were trying to raise Whig Volunteers and sending pro-
crastinating deputations till Cope should arrive, Lochiel
with five hundred Camerons quietly walked in at the
Netherbow, marched up the High Street, and grounded
arms at the Cross. ' Johnnie Cope ' had just landed
at Dunbar and been joined by the flying Dragoons,
September 18th.
He marched Westwards along the coast road with
2,300 men and six guns, and the Highland Army, perhaps
two hundred men stronger, flew to meet him. Murray
utterly outgeneralled Cope at Prestonpans, some twelve
miles East of Edinburgh, forcing him to change front
twice in succession, and finding his own way through
a very nasty marsh quite un perceived at 4 a.m. on 21st.
As the sun rose through the mist the Highlanders gave
one volley and fell on with the claymore. Cope's six
guns were fired once and killed one man ; then the
Gunners fled, then the Dragoons ; the Infantry had
little time left them to fly. As for the Volunteers,
' they were na worth a louse, man,' says Mr. Alick
Skirving, who saw the field covered with loose heads
and hands (the sword wounds inflicted by the clay-
more made an unusual and unpleasing impression on
troops accustomed to be killed by decent bullets). It
was all over in ten minutes, with 400 killed and 1,000
prisoners, and Cope led the shameful race to Berwick.
Charles was for following him up at once, for, though
THE JACOBITE ARMY 269
troops from Flanders were hurried over as quickly as
possible, only old Marshal Wade, with some 4,000 at
Newcastle, lay between him and London. But he was
overruled and fell back on Edinburgh, where his little
Army rapidly grew to 6,000 men.
Then followed that mad six weeks of glory and appre-
hension, during which Edinburgh knew itself for a
Capital again, and the ladies, Jacobites to the soles of
their dainty feet, danced minuets in Holyrood House,
while the portraits of a hundred and fifty kings
(painted for King James VII. by a Dutchman at
£1 13s. 4^. per king) looked down on waving tartans
and white cockades. The ' Highland Savages ' were
the best behaved of troops : no single act of cruelty
is proved against them, either then or during the
whole campaign ; and the Prince, as men complained,
gave all his prisoners too easy parole and attended
to the enemy's wounded before his own. A sort of
French Ambassador, M. d'Eguilles, came to the Court,
and the Lowland Jacobite Peers and lairds — alas*! but
a handful now — came too. There was old Balmerino,
whose ancestors had accompanied James VI. to Eng-
land ; there were Nairn and Nithsdale, whose fathers
had escaped as by miracle after the 'Fifteen ; Kenmure,
whose father had not escaped ; Pitsligo, Ogilvy, Kil-
marnock ; the brave but cantankerous Elcho, son of
the Earl of Wemyss ; Lord Lewis Gordon of the house
of Huntley ; Tullibardine, one of the ' Seven men of
Moidart ' and rightful Duke of Atholl ; good James
Drummond, rightful Duke of Perth ; Oliphant of Gask,
the most dashing cavalier, and Ker of Graden, the
heartiest fellow and best scout in the Army. Before
the end of October a few Frasers had come in ; but
270 A PERILOUS CAUSE
the head of that Clan, the old rogue Lovat, who might
have cut off Cope from Inverness last August, was still
sitting on the fence —
Suspensus, ut felis futurum
Despiciat simuletque sal turn.
But oh ! what quarrels in the little Council ! the rivalry
of the most loyal Chieftains inter se often thwarted the
best-laid schemes. Charles, they said, trusted only his
French and Irish friends ; he certainly mistrusted
Murray, who was rough in tongue, and yet he constantly
let Murray overrule him. He was, in fact, under no
illusions, and he soon began to see that a political cause
was utterly wanting to him ; he could enlist all hearts
but few reasons, and therefore few Lowland recruits.
He might put out proclamations denouncing the National
Debt and promising repeal of the Union, but it was
about ten years too late for that, for the Union was at
last beginning to bear solid commercial fruit. In the
absence, then, of a political cause, he must trust to the
sword alone, and that sword the Highland claymore ;
and this is why he was so right in desiring always to go
forward to London at the highest possible speed. The
proof of his helplessness was seen in his weak blockade
of Edinburgh Castle (September 29th to October 5th),
the Governor of which said, in fact, that if Auld Reekie
didn't send up daily supplies to his beleaguered garrison,
he would lay Auld Reekie in ashes (which he could
have done in twenty-four hours), and Charles had to
allow the supplies to be sent !
And France was more intent on following up her
conquests in Belgium than on risking her troops in
Britain. Saxe made far too little effort to prevent
ADVANCE INTO ENGLAND 271
' Billy ' Cumberland from shipping a great part of the
Anglo-Dutch Army across the North Sea. Cumberland
landed on the 19th ; whoever else might be in a
panic he wasn't, nor on the other hand did he make
light of the affair. He made extensive and suitable
preparations, which very nearly broke down from the
apathy of the English people, who would neither rise
for King James nor defend King George, 1 and from
the utter absence, then as always, of proper defences
against invasion. Wade, however, was strongly rein-
forced ; Cumberland himself would march to meet the
Prince, and attempts were made to raise a fresh Army
to defend London.
For Charles had now overruled his Council into in-
vading England, and on October 31st he started. His
own view, almost certainly right, was to go by the East
road and overwhelm Wade before his reinforcements
reached him ; but Lord George carried the day for the
familiar Western route (of 1648 and 1651). He made,
however, a feint at Wade which sufficed to keep him
immobile, while the Highland Army, six thousand strong,
roed swiftly by Moffat, Carlisle, Preston, Wigan, Man-
chester, always expecting English Jacobites to rise.
At Manchester alone were recruited some two hundred
men under Francis Towneley. Men and women came
out and stared at the ' plaid-men ' (from whom they
caught the itch, for cleanliness was not among the
Highland virtues), but few cried 'God bless them!'
When they reached Macclesfield they learned that
1 Some Whig nobles, e.g. the gallant Marquis of Granby, made
efforts, not without success, to raise regiments. The City started
a fund to provide the troops with blankets and gloves, and the
Quakers offered them flannel waistcoats.
272 AT DERBY, DECEMBER 6th
Cumberland, with 8,000 men, was in front at Lichfield,
and Wade lumbering down to Doncaster on their flank.
They did not know that it had become almost impossible
to raise recruits for these Armies, though King George
was offering £6 per man to any one who would join his
Guards. Even then Murray outgeneralled the Duke by
a feint to the West, and got between him and London ;
the Duke made frantic efforts to regain the road, but
only succeeded in foundering his horse. When he
reached Derby, but six or seven marches (126 miles)
lay between Charles and his goal ; there was a panic
in London and a run on the Bank.
Then, December 6th, the victors suddenly threw up
the sponge, and, after fighting almost alone against his
Council a long winter's day, Charles consented to a
retreat. All strategic considerations, said Murray, all
common prudence pointed in that direction ; it was but
reculer pour mieux sauter. But this Army had not
succeeded but by throwing prudence and strategic
considerations to the winds. And now they were in
excellent heart, well fed and even paid (the common
story that the Highlanders had deserted in crowds
during the march is now disproved) ; 1 they were five
thousand strong to a mere trifle of thirty thousand, most
of whom were already behind them. Besides, actual
numbers of enemies mattered little ; they were practically
certain to wipe before them anything except really well-
served Artillery, and of that the English had as yet little
ready ; London was (and still is) unfortified, and King
George at Kensington was packing his portmanteau.
1 Say they dropped on the way, at the outside, from speed,
desertion or sickness, a sixth of their number ; that was a very
unusually small proportion in the Eighteenth Century.
THE RETREAT FROM DERBY 273
" But," said Lord George, " once back in Scotland
we shall double our numbers ; France is really preparing
to send aid " : " Where," said Lord George, " are your
English Jacobites ? Who cries ' God save King James ! ' ? "
"Or who cries 'King George'?" the Prince might
have asked in return. " Rather than go back," he said,
" I would be twenty feet underground." But go back
they did.
Up till now there had been the makings of greatness
in this young Prince ; from that hour they vanished.
He who was wont to be the first astir in the morning,
sleeping little, faring of the hardest, and ever on foot
in the van, now became a laggard and indifferent, silent,
suspicious and grumpy. Flashes of the old fire came
out often enough, at Stirling, at Falkirk, on the morning
of Ciilloden, and in his long wanderings after that battle ;
but gradually the night fell, and the hero of romance
became in middle life an intriguer and a drunkard, in
old age a dotard and a wife-beater.
That, however, was as yet far away. Eleven days
after Derby his rear-guard killed at Clifton near Penrith
a hundred of Cumberland's pursuing horse ; his men
cheerily waded Esk bank-high in winter flood ; a garrison,
doomed to axe and rope, was left at Carlisle as a proof
that a return was intended. Neither Wade nor Hawley,
who succeeded to Wade's command, made any attempt
to bar the retreat, nor did Handyside, who now held
Edinburgh for King George, try to hinder Charles'
occupation of Whiggish Glasgow. And the reinforce-
ments did come till the Army reached the number of
nine thousand men ; the whole Clan Fraser came in,
as old Lovat had at last got down off the fence on
the right side, and with them a lot of Drummonds
vol. in 18
274 THE RETREAT TO THE HIGHLANDS
and Gordons. Even some Irish-French came, with an
absurd person who called himself an engineer, and
who tempted Charles to besiege Stirling Castle. When
Hawley advanced to the relief of that Castle, Lord
George swept his Dragoons with great loss from the
field of Falkirk, as he had swept them from Preston-
pans, and took many prisoners. But on February ist
a decision only less fatal than that at Derby was taken,
again utterly against the Prince's will, to retreat to the
Highlands ; apart from the moral effect of such a retreat,
it was a mere courting of starvation.
Cumberland, who had been in the South for a few
weeks, came North again at the end of February and
restored discipline in Hawley's terrified Army. He
brought five thousand Hessian mercenaries to hold the
line of th£ Forth, he occupied the whole East coast
and was fed from the Fleet as he moved towards
Aberdeen ; and there he lay all March, training his
Infantry to face the Highland broadsword. Lord
Loudoun was busy raising the Whig Clans for King
George. Charles chased Loudoun and the Macleods in
wild panic out of Inverness and seized Fort Augustus,
but failed at Fort William and at Blair Castle. When
in April Cumberland with 18 pieces of heavy Artillery
and 8,000 men, 1 began to move along the shore of the
Moray Firth towards Nairn, the Highlanders, already
starving, were scattered in a wide circle round Inver-
ness searching for food, and about one-third of them
had been despatched to meet a French convoy on the
Pentland Firth.
So not more than five thousand men were present for
the fatal 16th at Culloden. The ground on which they
1 Including some 500 of the Whig Clans, mostly Campbells.
BATTLE OF CULLODEN 275
fought, the day on which to fight, were not of Lord
George's choosing, and the battle was one of starvation
versus a full belly. The Macdonalds were posted out
of their accustomed place, and got sulky; the Artillery
tore long lines in the other Clans before they could
charge ; yet even so they charged through the guns,
sabred the gunners, broke through the Duke's first line,
and their leaders reached his second before they were
shot down. Cumberland gave little quarter, either now
or in his subsequent ' pacification ' of the Highlands ; he
shot or burned all the wounded, all who were found with
arms. He was about the same age as Prince Charles,
and his brutalities are, thank God, without parallel in
the history of the British Army. One cherishes a hope
that the worst of these cruelties were committed not
by honest English ploughboys, but by the countrymen of
King George, Hessians purchased from their ' natural '
Prince at five pounds per year per Hessian. 1
Did Charles leave the field too soon ? Who knows ?
Certainly he gave the fatal order, after the battle, ' Let
every man seek his safety as best he can.' A fatal order
indeed, for, though we had lost 1,000 out of 5,000 we
had hit the Hanoverians pretty hard in return. 2
Culloden was no Naseby, and the spirit of the fighting
Clans had not been broken by the loss of one battle ;
on the 18th nearly 4,000 rallied at Ruthven under
Lord George, Tullibardine, Perth, Ogilvy and the sore
wounded Lochiel. But the Prince had fled; none as
yet heard whither.
1 Probably also by the Highlanders of the Whig Clans,
Campbells and Macleods, who had the old scores of Montrose's
days to pay off.
2 The 4th and the 37th Regiments suffered the worst.
276 THE PRINCE'S ESCAPE
Every one knows how he wandered and lurked in
caves and bothies to and fro between the Islands and the
Western mainland for five wonderful months. Every one
has heard of Flora Macdonald of Milton, and the tall
spinning-woman called ' Betty Burke from Ireland '
whom Miss Flora brought with her to Kingsburgh's
house in Skye on June 29th : ' a very odd, muckle, ill-
shaken-up wife ' Betty seemed to be. Betty-Charles
in fact bore, during those five months, a good deal more
than his father's uncle had borne during his flight from
Worcester, and honestly confessed that he had learned
during his skulking to take a hearty dram when he
could get it ; unfortunately drams were easier to come
at in the Highlands than bannocks or beef, and the
habit remained with the Prince in climates where he
needed it less. Thirty thousand pounds (sterling, not
Scots) was the price upon his head ; this was well
known to a population of 200,000 persons, habitually
living on the verge of starvation. One-thousandth
part of that price would have been wealth untold
to ninety-nine in every hundred of that population.
His secret and his whereabouts must have become
known to, and his hairbreadth escapes must have
been aided by well over a hundred of these poor
people ; they must have been suspected by many
hundreds more. Every pass was beset, every cave
smoked out, every corrie and hilltop scoured by red-
coats burning for the reward ; flogging and torture were
freely applied to every one who was supposed to have
an inkling of the secret. But the loyalty of Scotland
was proof against all trials ; Donald remained as dumb
as Ailsa Craig. The Prince was hiding in a hole on the
side of Ben Alder when he learned, on September 13th,
THE END OF THE CAUSE 277
that a St. Malo privateer was in Loch-na-nuagh ; a
week later he was aboard of her, and on the 29th he
landed at Roscoff in Brittany. Forty-two years of exile
and degradation lay yet before him. The present writer
was carried in his infancy to see an old lady, then hard
upon a hundred years, who had kissed his hand in
Florence or in Rome. The story of the 'Forty-five
has been the theme alike of the loftiest romance and the
most pitiful drivel ; but, when the plain facts are put
down, it is hard to say that the reality does not vie in
interest with any romance that could be written.
And so it was all over, and the heading and hanging
began — mostly at Carlisle and London, with all the
ghastly accompaniments of the English punishment for
treason ; and the name of Murray of Broughton, once
Prince Charles' right hand, became for ever infamous as
that of a perjured traitor who turned King's evidence.
This time the Government would make a full end ;
Balmerino, Kilmarnock, old Lovat (who really only got
his deserts) and Francis Towneley were the most dis-
tinguished sufferers ; there were about eighty victims
in all. Few pardons were granted, and few forfeited
estates ever restored. Highland dress was proscribed
and the heritable jurisdictions were abolished. This
was a really good job; these ' Courts of Regality,' over
a hundred in number, had put the poor tenants too
often at the mercy of their Chiefs ; we all know the
story of the woman who said to her husband, " Come
awa' and be hangit doucely, and dinna anger the
Laird." And the Highlands were depopulated.
And ' it was far better ' ? Oh yes ! it was ' far
better ' (because it came to pass) that Britain should be
governed by a German boor than that we should ' suffer
278 THE END OF THE CAUSE
Popery and arbitrary power and wear wooden shoes ' ;
we should, of course, have suffered and worn these things
if King Jamie, the most gentle, tolerant, honourable
soul who ever threw away a crown, had been restored.
It never seems to occur to any one who argues thus
that it is an insult to the British aristocracy and to
the all-powerful British Parliament to suggest that, in
full Eighteenth Century, it could not have kept in order
any King who ever strutted. King George was an
infinitely more ' arbitrary ' man than King James ; he
damned and cursed his Ministers to their faces ; he
stole his father's will in order to cheat his sister of a
legacy, and he treated his son with infamous cruelty.
He would have entirely subordinated English to German
interests ; but Parliament kept him and every other
King in order as soon as it put its foot down.
With the close of the ' Rebellion ' Scottish history
is finally merged in British. The Episcopal Church
was, by Acts of 1746, 1748, practically proscribed ;
though few of its ministers had taken overt part for
the Prince, all had been at heart on his side ; the only
two who followed his Army were executed. Some Non-
Jurors kept a feeble flame alive till the death of Prince
Henry, who died a Roman Cardinal, in 1807 ; all had
been steadily coming to use the English Liturgy, or a
Prayer Book closely resembling it, since the death of
Anne. Yet the Kirk, whose triumph seemed more com-
plete than ever, reaped little fruit from it. Secessions
had begun, largely in protest against patronage, as early
as 1737 ; they were multiplying rapidly, and all were
in the conservative direction, all were made because
the Kirk was becoming too moderate, too reasonable ;
because ministers were ceasing to hold forth for a
A CHANGING SCOTLAND 279
hundred successive sabbaths 1 on the same text, as
the old practice had been ; because the tyranny of
the Elders in Kirk Session was being relaxed. While
the Seceders stood for the pure old Kirk of dogmatic
Calvinism and the Covenant, the change in the spirit
of those who remained went on apace, and the last
half of the Eighteenth Century was intellectually and
socially the golden age of Presbyterian Scotland, in
which she produced her really great men — Principal
Robertson, Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Beattie, Reid,
Dr. John Erskine, men to whom dogma meant little
and lofty morality much. It would no longer happen
to any printer, who printed a work of any of these
men, to come across ' God's Wrath ' so frequently
as to exhaust his fount of the letter ' W ' and be
at last obliged to print ' God's Wrath.' The last
capital sentence for witchcraft was executed in 1727,
and the Acts against that ' crime ' were repealed in the
year of the Porteous Riot. Education, it is true, was
still backward, and the Act of 1696 was a dead letter
in many remote districts ; the salaries of parish school-
masters were infinitesimal. But the passion of all
classes for education was strong and growing. Most
burghs had grammar schools, where excellent Latin
was taught ; the Universities, which taught no Latin
except by lecturing in it, monopolized Greek. Social
life was, and long remained, curiously simple ; the
friendship between rich and poor dwelling on the land,
or in flats in the same house in cities, was maintained
until the Industrial Revolution at the close of the century.
Crime was remarkable by its absence ; there were no
1 Five years of Sabbaths on the same text is believed to be
1 the record.'
280 THE NEW SCOTLAND
highwaymen — indeed they would have earned a poor
living. Years passed without an execution in Edin-
burgh ; there was seldom a week without one in London.
By Scots law seventeen crimes were death-worthy, by
English one hundred and sixty-four. People hardly
ever locked their doors, even in towns. Poverty and
beggary were before every one's eyes, but pauperism
was all but unknown ; the first rate for it was raised
in Glasgow in 1770, elsewhere not till about 1800 ; in
England, where wages were double, every fifth man was
a pauper. The reason of the difference lies in the
kindly feeling between all classes which was such a
marked characteristic of old Scottish life.
From the accession of George III. material prosperity
increased too rapidly not to foreshadow some change
in these beautiful conditions. The development of
agriculture, forestry and commerce went on with giant
strides. Banks were established in country towns.
Rich East India merchants and Glasgow- Virginia traders
bought land and cultivated it scientifically, and Scottish
farming and gardening began to be held up as an example
in England. Linen, woollen and thread manufactures
flourished apace, the famous Carron ironworks, where
grew the ' carronades ' for Nelson's fleets, were opened
in 1760, the Forth and Clyde Canal was opened in 1778.
A few years before this James Watt had patented a
noisy machine which he called a ' Steam-Engine ' ; it
was a more successful one than Prince Rupert's. In
such a society as this Adam Smith, the father of Free
Trade, wrote his ' Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth
of Nations,' and into such a society Robert Burns and
Walter Scott were born. At the end of the century
Glasgow counted 90,000 souls ; the population of the
w
m
j
CO
n
NN
J!
5
m
f
w
z,
j
THE NEW SCOTLAND 281
whole kingdom of Scotland was one and a half millions,
and the revenue had risen in a hundred years from
£160,000 to £8,160,000.
Much, however, was going to pass away ; the frugal,
stern life, the homely ' Lallan ' tongue (the purest
Teutonic dialect in the world), would vanish as riches
and intercourse with other Nations increased. The
new landlords in the Highlands grew sheep and beasts
rather than men, and the men had to go. Sergeant
More Macalpin, returning covered with glory from forty
years' service in George III.'s wars, was very apt to
find, on his return to his native glen, ' the fires quenched
on thirty hearths, and of the cottage of his fathers but
a few rude stones.' He turned his eyes longingly towards
Canada, whither all of his race seemed to have gone ;
he even started on the journey, but, as we know, he
never got farther than Gandercleuch ; and there, on
many a Sabbath morning, we may believe that his heart,
and sister Janet's beside him, swelled to the noble words
of the Second Paraphrase : —
Our vows, our prayers we now present
Before Thy throne of Grace,
God of our Fathers, be the God
Of their succeeding race !
CHAPTER VIII
THE LOSS OF AMERICA
King George's III/s character has gained, perhaps,
some favour in history from the fact of his coming
between his shocking old grandfather and his quite
unspeakable son. But the fact remains that, except
where politics were concerned, George III. was an honest
man ; unfortunately this is, in the case of a King, a big
exception. Speaking and thinking wholly in English,
with a passion for violent exercise, George had in private
life something in him of the typical John Bull ; his
tastes were simple, economical, domesticated, and he
was sincerely pious and religious ; he loved, and to
some extent understood farming, and he liked to make
a good bargain over his pigs ; he loved hunting, and,
even when he became blind, loved long rides about
Windsor Park with a groom and a leading-rein ; he loved
patronizing the poor, and he loved laying down the
law to every one he met. In public, unless vehemently
excited, he had some natural dignity ; in private life
none whatever. Unfortunately, both in public and
private, 'he was often vehemently excited, and then he
became rude or sullen. The history of his illnesses is
obscure, but it is certain that his excitability often
bordered on mental derangement ; on at least two
occasions, perhaps on four, temporary insanity fol-
282
CHARACTER OF GEORGE III. 283
lowed, and in 18 11 he became finally insane. But
always he had the oddest manners, the most absurd
habits of inquisitiveness, of rapid talk and repetition
of his words, with a ' hey ? hey ? ' or * what ? what ?
what ? ' at the end of each sentence.
His mother, fearing corruption for his morals, had
kept him very close to her side, and his education had
been much neglected ; he could speak French and
German, but knew nothing of the classics, of literature,
history or art, though after a fashion he tried to patronize
them all ; Handel's music he knew and loved, but it
was his only elevated taste ; one is glad to think that
he could solace himself with this when he was old, blind
and insane. Once on the throne he set himself to be
an industrious King, in which capacity his natural
stupidity made him pay absurd attention to trifles ; he
wrote with his own hand numerous and very ungram-
matical letters to his Ministers on matters that would
better have been left to them. Yet in the course of his
long reign he picked up a very considerable knowledge
of mankind, and often, especially in matters concerning
the Army, astonished the said Ministers by sensible
suggestions and criticisms. He believed his own dis-
tinguishing characteristic to be firmness ; others said
that it was obstinacy. His personal bravery was un-
doubted, and was splendidly shown on the several occa-
sions on which his life was attempted by fanatics. And
when, in June, 1780, all his Ministers and magistrates
quailed before a ' No Popery ' riot, which put London
for three days in the hands of a fierce mob, the King
saved his Capital by calling out the troops and bidding
them shoot.
He was just twenty-two at his accession. He and
284 OBJECTS OF GEORGE IIL
his Queen Charlotte, a Princess of Mecklenburg, whom
he married in 1761, set a noble example of purity at
Court, but they brought up their children both stupidly
and sternly ; the family circle at Windsor or Kew or
Buckingham House was so dull, the rooms so bitterly
cold and so Spartan in furniture, the family dinners so
invariably consisted of roast mutton and rice pudding,
the family prayers were so awfully regular, that nearly
all the seven of their sons who attained maturity escaped
whenever they could, got drunk and ran after actresses.
And both father and mother were cruelly unforgiving.
When we turn to the Rex politicus we find a very
different picture ; the stupidity remains visible, but the
honesty has disappeared. It is commonly said that
George proposed to himself the laudable end of breaking
up the system of government by parties, and that he
very largely succeeded. The truth is rather that he
set himself to break up the most powerful party in the
State, that of the Whigs, which was already breaking
itself up into sections and family groups ; and he ex-
pected to succeed to the influence possessed in Parlia-
ment and in the country by that party. In fact, he set
himself to be a party leader and to create a party for
himself. In this latter aim he had for about eleven years,
1770-81, some measure of success, and a kind of new
Tory party came into existence ; 1 but the net result was
that after his effort was spent, parties came back worse
1 It must be remembered that until, and indeed long after
the French Revolution had begun, all sections of English political
leaders still called themselves Whigs ; the name ' Tory ' was
revived, as a stigma for the party of the Government, about the
year 1794. But historians generally now speak of the ' King's
friends ' of 1770-82 as Tories, of North as a Tory, and, almost
always, of the younger Pitt, from 1793 onwards, as a Tory.
MEANS ADOPTED BY GEORGE III. 285
than ever, have been getting worse ever since and do
get visibly worse every day. The means by which
the King proposed to attain his end were the same
means by which Walpole and Newcastle had purchased
for themselves majorities in Parliament and the good
things of office — to wit, distribution of patronage in
Church and State, in Army, Navy, Civil Service and
Court, even direct bribery in hard cash; all of which
means it is bad enough for a Newcastle, but unspeakably
bad for a King to use. George III. did, in fact, at the
very time when the better part of the aristocracy was
revolting against this system, stereotype and rivet it
upon the necks of Englishmen ; for the Opposition,
having nothing else to fight him with, fought him with
his own weapons. The only difference between then
and now is that party leaders now bribe with other
people's money instead of with their own. George spent
in jobbery of this sort all his own Civil List (which
accounts for the homely diet of his family as well as for
the fact that his tradesmen usually went unpaid), and
as much more as Parliament, which he repeatedly asked
to pay large debts for him, would grant ; and so, in spite
of his frugality, he was one of the most expensive Kings
in history.
What contemporaries in the first twenty years of the
reign saw, and saw often with a good deal of sympathy,
was a dogged effort of the King to get Ministers to
his mind, and to choose them independently of party
connections. The disinterested part of the Nation was
decidedly with the King against the great Whig houses.
Not that the great Whig houses had governed altogether
badly, but that they were becoming ridiculous ; there
were Russell Whigs, Grenville Whigs, Wentworth Whigs,
286 THE WHIG GROUPS
Pelham Whigs and Cavendish Whigs ; just so many
family groups. Each said, " I can't take office without
my Friends " — with a big F. People looked at Mr. Pitt
and said, ' Ah ! he was the man, he was independent
of family connections/ It was true indeed that Pitt
hated Newcastle and the old Whig family groups ; but
he too had a family group of his own, the Grenville
group, headed by Earl Temple. Whenever he was offered
power, Pitt was obliged, like every one else, to say, " I
won't come in without my Friends ; if your Majesty
won't ' make room ' for them, I must involve myself
in my virtue." What the Nation often, and the King
at first failed to see, was that his choice of Ministers
must be determined by the willingness of Parliament
to support them ; the King turned to man after man,
to group after group in vain, until at last he began to see
that he must buy a majority in the Houses to support
the man of his choice ; and from about '67, when the
idea seems to have been suggested to him by Henry
Fox, he set himself to do this. But, even when he had
got some sort of majority, and had got the Minister to
his mind, he never seems to have been able to trust
him, and continually intrigued against him or bullied
him into acting against his own judgment. Lord Shel-
burne said that he ' excelled in the art of obtaining
men's confidences and then availing himself of his know-
ledge to sow dissensions between them.' In the last
resort he could always threaten to go mad if his wishes
were thwarted. So, as for his methods, they were as
detestable and as mean as they could be.
But as for his ends ? his political opinions ? and his
prejudices ? One is bound to confess that, good or bad,
these were based upon the opinions and prejudices of-
MAIN PERIODS OF THE REIGN 287
the bulk of his English subjects. He and the Nation
wanted to coerce America ; we cannot wholly blame
either for losing it instead. He and the Nation were
against a licentious press, against mob rule, against
1 Wilkes and Liberty,' against a sweeping Parliamentary
reform ; we cannot wholly blame either for having
thereby called Radicalism into existence ; he and the
Nation were against justice to Roman Catholics ; but
neither was clever enough to foresee that the refusal
of this would make Irish disloyalty permanent. And
occasionally he and the Nation were most gloriously
right. A weaker King and a weaker Nation might
easily have coerced their aristocracy into making a
degrading Peace with the French Revolution.
Complex as the ministerial and parliamentary history
of the reign is, the great outstanding features of it are
simple and few. In the first twenty-three years come
the loss of America and the last war with Old France ;
in the next ten the epoch of financial reform ; while,
of the remaining twenty-seven, twenty-two are occupied
with the struggle against New France and the Spirit
of Revolution. Through the whole sixty years that
other Revolution is going on which was to change Eng-
land from a self-supporting agricultural country into
the workshop of the modern World. Of politicians and
their intrigues I shall say as little as possible, except in
so far as they affect these great subjects.
We have seen, in discussing the close of the Seven
Years' War, at the end of a previous chapter, how Pitt
had gone off in the sulks and how Newcastle had been
contemptuously dismissed. Bute, the ' favourite ' who
succeeded to the Treasury, was a failure, and resigned
in April '63, and so George's first serious Minister was
288 JOHN WILKES
Pitt's brother-in-law, George Grenville, a conceited,
industrious, solemn fellow, without a spark of imagina-
tion, but a sound financier. The King probably thought
that Grenville would prove a tool, but found that he
had got, instead, a master who gave him long lectures
on his duty. Grenville and the other Ministers managed
to put themselves technically in the wrong, in the year
'64, by issuing a warrant of doubtful legality against
a very clever and unscrupulous libeller called John
Wilkes, Member for Aylesbury, who was a friend of
Pitt's ally, Lord Temple. Wilkes denounced Lord Bute,
the Ministry and the Peace in a newspaper called the
North Briton. The King took up the question hotly,
and insisted on the prosecution of the libeller. At
first it was mainly a couple of legal questions that
were involved — whether the publication of a seditious
libel is a ' breach of the peace,' or merely ' an act
tending to a breach of the peace,' and whether a
' general warrant,' i.e. a warrant to arrest an unnamed
person or persons, is legal. But from a pamphleteer
Wilkes, who caught the ear of the Opposition, rapidly
developed into a demagogue, a champion of unlimited
press-licence and a ' martyr for liberty ' ; all this
probably somewhat against his own natural inclina-
tions, for, though a man of profligate life, he had some
of the instincts both of statesmanship and patriotism
in him. Successive Houses of Commons, each more
and more under George's influence, persecuted and
expelled Wilkes ; and their legal right to do this was
more than doubtful. 1 In '74 they gave up the struggle
1 The House had perhaps the legal right to expel a Member ;
but it went further and passed resolutions declaring Wilkes
incapable of being re-elected.
ORIGIN OF THE QUARREL WITH AMERICA 289
and Wilkes was allowed to sit for Middlesex, and
in '82 all the proceedings of the House against him
were expunged from its journals. The only real im-
portance of the quarrel, apart from the legal questions
involved, is that the excitement of the populace
in his favour, culminating in '68 in very serious riots,
was one of the symptoms of the birth of modern
Radicalism. In the height of the Wilkes fever, London
was in a condition of fearful disorder ; strikers as-
sembled in Palace Yard and threatened members of
both Houses, and there were furious fights between
sailors and coal-heavers on the river. " Mr. Green's
house," says Horace Walpole, " was besieged by the
coal-heavers for nine hours, but he killed eighteen of
them." From this time onward attempts to coerce the
Houses by ' monster petitions ' and by mob violence
have never wholly ceased.
But the real interest of Grenville's Ministry is the
beginning of the quarrel with the Colonies of North
America. The prosperity of these thirteen ' Planta-
tions,' now that they were freed from the fear of the
French, naturally increased at a great rate ; and the
almost virgin field of Canada was just freshly open to
their ' pushfulness.' And the richer they grew, the
more absurd appeared the restrictions which the Naviga-
tion Acts laid on their trade. Grenville, however, was
resolved to enforce these restrictions, and in particular
to put down the extensive system of smuggling 4 to foreign
countries on which the New Englanders, especially those
of Boston, were growing so rich. He also considered,
and in this he was by no means singular, that the Colonists
ought to be made to contribute, if not to the expenses
of the late war, which had been fought largely on their
vol. III. 19
290 REAL INTENTIONS OF THE AMERICANS
behalf, at least to the cost of their own defence in future.
Accordingly he proposed to raise in British America
a small sum of £100,000 by a tax on contracts called a
' Stamp Act.' There was nothing new in a proposal
to tax America ; Walpole had rejected it ; the great
lawyer Hardwicke had said long ago that he believed
it to be legal ; the greatest living lawyer, Mansfield,
refused to give any legal opinion on it. Some of the
Colonial Charters mentioned self-taxation as a special
right ; others did not. The able young Lord Shelburne,
at the head of the Board of Trade in 1763, had been
occupied with schemes for raising some contribution
from the Colonies ; but there was no special Secretary
of State for the Colonies until 1768. l
The Colonists would probably have refused and re-
belled in whatever form the proposition was put to them.
They never pretended to be grateful to the Mother
Country, and they had never been really loyal to her.
" Forty years ago," wrote John Wesley in 1780, " when
my brother was in Boston, the general language there
was, ' We must throw off the yoke of England ; we
shall never be a free people till we do so.' " If they had
been left alone Americans might have gone on grumbling
and absorbed in their own interests ; their politicians
might have continued to breathe their lungs in petty
quarrels with their Governors until some new grievance
gavQ them their handle. But at the first grievance
they would have been up in arms. As for a permanent
garrison of British soldiers, which Grenville wished
to maintain in America, the Colonists would none of
it ; it would be used, they thought, to put down
1 In 1782 this office was again abolished, and was not recreated
until 1801. In the interim it was annexed to the War Office.
DISLOYALTY OF THE AMERICAN LEADERS 291
smuggling, and to strengthen the very weak hands of
the Government. The proposed tax, they cried, vio-
lated the ' first principle ' of government, which is 'jio
taxation without representation.' Now this is certainly
not thus a [ principle ' of the British or of any other
government, still less is it a [ Law of Nature ' ; it is,
however, a very good working basis of politics, and any
glaring violation of it is sure to raise an outcry. But
there were plenty of so-called Whigs, both in the Old
and New Worlds, who were beginning, unlike their
ancestors of the Seventeenth Century, to appeal broad-
cast to ' principles of government ' rather than to
Common Law rights. Yet if any real principle was
involved it was that enunciated, in the very crisis of
the rebellion, by Adam Smith, that Colonies ought to
contribute to the revenue of the Mother Country, and
ought not to be retained if they don't.
The majority of the Americans had certainly no wish
to break the tie of Union ; but a majority whose loyalty
is wholly inert is always at the mercy of a minority
which speaks and acts with decision. The baleful skill
with which the leaders of the revolt played their
cards has seldom been equalled. The most disgusting
hypocrite of the lot is perhaps Benjamin Franklin, the
Pennsylvania Quaker, who, with loyalty ever on his
lips, patiently undermined in both Worlds the cause of
the loyalists and of the Government, seduced Chatham,
whom he visited in '74, with his glib phrases about
the ■ old Whigs of 1688 ' and the like ; swore that his
countrymen had no thought of separation at the very
time that Congress was in the making ; and, finally,
negotiated the Treaty with France. The rant and froth
about Natural Rights were left to Patrick Henry and
292 EFFECTS OF THE STAMP ACT, 1764
Jefferson ; the Machiavellian intrigues to Samuel Adams.
Every molehill of maladministration was magnified into
a mountain, and artfully shown off on a broad background
of ' principle.'
The Stamp Act, passed in '64, was not to become
law till '65, and the year of suspense let loose the flood
of opposition in both Worlds. George was already in
bitter quarrel with Grenville over a Regency Bill,
and was trying to get fid of him ; the great French
Minister, Choiseul, was watching England ' going to
pieces in anarchy,' and praying that the anarchy might
continue till the French Fleet was rebuilt. The Assembly
of Massachusetts led the way in remonstrances against
the Act, and the smuggling populace of Boston led
the way in riots and sacking of Custom-houses. The
Assembly of Virginia, more temperate but not more
loyal, proceeded to organize ' constitutional resistance,'
in the shape of a Central Assembly at New York, to
which nine of the Colonies sent members, for the despatch
of petitions to the British Government. They did not,
we observe, ask for representation in the British Parlia-
ment, which would have been the true solution of the
difficulty ; indeed it is not strange that they did not,
for their politicians would have been drowned and-
isolated in that Assembly. But it is strange that
British statesmanship paid so little attention to this
plan, which was known to be in the air even before
it was definitely proposed by Adam Smith, for it
was a plan which would have made the Britain of
our own days the centre of a world-wide Federated
Empire, without the farce of ' self-governing Colonies,'
which are in reality bound to her only by the
t weakest tie of sentiment — a tie incapable of standing
MINISTERIAL CHANGES, 1765-6 293
the strain of conflicting interests for any serious length
of time.
Dis aliter visum. Pitt, who had- already in most
unworthy fashion denounced the Peace of 1763, went
back at once to the factious attitude of his earlier years
and thundered out a lot of splendid froth about ' chains '
and ' slavery ' ; but refused to take office when George
dismissed Grenville. In despair the King turned to the
Wentworth section of the Whigs, under the tame and
stupid Lord Rockingham, who was perhaps bullied
and perhaps frightened into repealing the Stamp Act,
while passing an Act declaratory of the ' right ' of
King and Parliament to tax the Colonies. This was
doing the maximum of mischief with the minimum of
good. To the King this ' Old-Whig ' Ministry was merely
a stop-gap ; it included the detested and now quite
effete Newcastle (who didn't die till '68), the honest and
shrewd Duke of Grafton, whose real insight was ren-
dered useless by fatal indecision of character, and the
highly honourable soldier, General Conway, as Leader
in the Commons. But all the time the King was in-
triguing against them and trying to set them at variance
one with the other ; all the time he was making over-
tures to Pitt, at last (July, '66) successfully. Rockingham
and Newcastle were dismissed ; Grafton became nominal
head of a Ministry in which Pitt, as Earl of Chatham,
took the Privy Seal and was intended to take the real
lead. The King had been alternately repelled by and
drawn towards Pitt, but on the whole rightly believed
the latter to be as much averse to Newcastleism as
himself. He also thought that Pitt would find some
means of conciliating America, but in this he was
deceived. The new Ministry included Grafton, Shel-
294 LORD CHATHAM'S BOMBAST
burne and the great lawyer Camden, all of them, to
some extent, political pupils of Pitt, and a brilliant
but rash Chancellor of the Exchequer called Charles
Townshend.
Now it is true that the Colonists erected statues and
named cities after Pitt and professed to adore him ;
true also that his lofty imperialistic imagination would
have prevented him from passing a Stamp Act or any
such folly. But, when it came to finding remedies for
the existing tension, he was as much at sea as any one
else. In his speeches he went very near to denying
the Sovereignty of the Mother Country ; and he did
actually deny the right to tax. But, on the other hand,
his utter ignorance of law, logic and economic principles
led him to maintain, in the same breath, the right to
impose Customs-duties and to regulate American trade.
The Whigs were on sounder ground when, by the mouth
of their great political philosopher, Burke, who had
entered Parliament as a protege of Rockingham, they
upheld the right, but denied the expediency of all taxa-
tion. Once in office Chatham seems to have neglected
American affairs altogether, and to have devoted his
attention to grand schemes, such as the assumption of
the sovereignty of India by the Crown and the further
humiliation of his old French enemies by a triple alliance
with Prussia and Russia. When the latter scheme was
spoiled by the cold astuteness of Frederick the Great,
who had had enough of alliances with English party
governments, Chatham simply took the gout and sulked.
In fact, except in the crisis of a great war, this man was
never fitted for office at all ; he flouted his colleagues,
even when they were his devoted friends, quite as much
as he had flouted Newcastle ; he would be sole Minister
FRESH AGITATION IN AMERICA, 1768-70 295
or nothing. So he became nothing, and wouldn't even
answer letters. George kept him till '68 because of the
magic of his name, and poor Grafton bore the brunt
of the work without any authority over his colleagues.
The King got hold of Townshend, or Townshend got
hold of The King, and, as '66 had been a bad financial
year, they proposed a whole row of new and irritating
little taxes on America. Grafton, who had opposed
these taxes in the Cabinet, ostentatiously dissociated
himself in Parliament from such measures ; but the
growing party of ' King's friends ' rallied to them
and they were carried. The flame of agitation in
America blazed up again, and the Assembly of Massa-
chusetts sent a circular letter to all the other Colonies.
The Governor dissolved it, but, like the Scottish
Assembly of 1638, it continued to sit, and this was
an act of flat rebellion. Soldiers were drafted into
Boston, and, in March, '70, after enduring for eighteen
months every imaginable insult and cruelty from the
lawless mob, they shot in one of the daily riots no less
than three persons. Boston gravely put on mourning
and called it a ' massacre.' Meanwhile, Townshend
had died in the autumn of '67, and Chatham had
resigned a year later, the Wilkes riots, both in and
out of Parliament, being then at their height ; gout
and depression vanished as soon as Chatham was relieved ?
of responsibility, and the House of Lords soon rang
with his thunders on the old theme of chains and slavery.
Well might Choiseul congratulate himself on the endemic
anarchy of Britain. His Fleet was nearly ready. He
grabbed at. Corsica in '69, in the teeth of British protests,
just in time to enable Napoleon Bonaparte to be born
a French subject ; and in the autumn of '70 he was
296 LORD NORTH'S MINISTRY, 1770
preparing to support the claims of Spain to oust Great
Britain from the Falkland Isles, far away by Cape Horn.
Chatham, reckless of consequences, cried out for war ; .
but for the moment we were saved from war by the
timidity of Louis XV., who dismissed his great Minister
and erected peace-at-any-price into a system for the
remainder of his reign.
Grafton resigned in January, '70, and Frederick,
Lord North, a descendant of Charles II.'s Tory Chan-
cellor, was promoted from the Exchequer to the Treasury.
He held office for just over twelve eventful years ; a
man of charming wit and unfailing tact and temper,
perfectly disinterested and fearless, and perfectly in-
different to popularity, but continually yielding his
own judgment to that of King George, and to that of
the now compact body of ' King's friends,' who formed
his best supporters in Parliament ; and it must be at
once admitted that he had also at his back the bulk of
the Nation. But the best cards in his hand were supplied
by the unscrupulous violence of the Opposition ; America,
Wilkes, the City of London, the East India Company,
Chatham, Burke, Shelburne, Rockingham, Old Whigs and
New Whigs, all but a few of the Russell section — were
soon in full cry at his heels, and their factious music,
disgusted all sober persons. Fox thought North 'the
most accomplished speaker that ever sat in Parlia-
ment,' and the Minister had the happy gift of going
to sleep during the long, dull speeches of his opponents,
and of waking up to answer them from notes taken
by an Under Secretary. He ' faced the music ' session
after session with great courage, and we may set
down to his credit in home affairs the first ' Relief
Bills ' in the direction of religious toleration for the
OPEN REBELLION IN AMERICA, 1774 297
Roman Catholics (1778), and a further measure in
favour of Protestant dissenters (1779). North was
also the first Minister to profit by the lessons of Adam
Smith, and he began the readjustment of the basis
of taxation by his Inhabited House duty (1778), his
Stamp Duty and his tax on men-servants. t j
But the American business was beyond him altogether ;
personally he disbelieved in coercion, and would rather
have let the Colonies go than fight a Civil War ; but
the King and the bulk of the Nation thought otherwise.
North began by taking off all Colonial taxes except one
on tea ; had he removed that too, it is just possible the
fire might have died down ; the years , 7 0- 73 were
comparatively calm in America, though Adams and
Chatham, on their respective sides of the Atlantic,
assiduously blew the flame. But in '73 came North's
1 Quebec Act,' which Was designed to extend the
boundaries of Canada to the whole ' hinterland ' of
the Ohio and to the upper waters of the Mississippi ;
a territory which the Colonists of New York and
Pennsylvania already considered, and with some justice,
to be their natural ground for expansion. 1 And, in
the same year, the East India Company was allowed
to export its tea direct to America. This, which was
really a benefit to the Colonists (for they got the
tea ninepence a pound cheaper than if it had paid
duty in England), was seized on by Adams as a
1 mean attempt to bribe us into paying the tea
tax here/ In Boston harbour the Indiamen were
boarded, and the tea thrown into the sea (December,
1773). North answered by Bills closing the Port of
1 North's Act was also denounced because it protected the
Catholic religion in Canada,
298 WAR IN SIGHT, 1774
Boston, revoking the Charter of the Colony, and em-
powering its Governor to send the rioters for trial to
England. The American leaders forthwith summoned
all the Colonies to send delegates to a central Congress
in New York ; this met in September, '74, and at once
attempted, though in vain, to incite the Canadians
to join in open revolt. Agreements were largely
signed throughout America against the importation of
British goods ; and, but for the fact that the very
men who signed them had taken care to ' dry up '
the British market first, by buying enough woollens
and iron goods to last for many years, our trade
would have suffered a very severe blow by these
agreements.
From that hour dated the suppression of free thought
in America. A Radical has been well defined as a person
who talks most loudly about the rights of the Sovereign
People but is always most violent in preventing the
majority of the said people from exercising those rights.
The large majority of the people of America did not
want separation, and did want British goods ; the
Radical leaders would compel them to get the former
and go without the latter. No loyalist who dared to
express his opinions was safe from having his house
burned and his naked body tarred and feathered. All
through the struggle, and for ever after it, the American
leaders showed their true nature by steadily refusing
compensation to the sufferers by these outrages. Both
in '74 and '75 strongly conciliatory measures were
brought forward in Parliament, North himself carrying
a motion that any Colony which would agree to make
a voluntary contribution to the defence of the Empire
should be for ever exempt from taxation. The Congress
HOWE AND WASHINGTON 299
utterly refused to listen even to this ; it was, in fact,
busy collecting arms and powder. North, though he
had the country behind him, as the large Government
majority returned at the elections of '74 had proved,
and though he had been plainly told by General Gage,
who was in command at Boston, that 20,000 men was
the very lowest figure he would require, shrank till the
last moment from any step towards war. Not until
the beginning of '75 did he reluctantly send out Sir
William Howe with seven battalions, to reinforce our
slender garrison at Boston. Before Howe arrived the
first blood had been shed, and our first repulse at the
hands of the American Militia had been suffered at
Lexington (April, '75).
Howe, when he landed, found that a fresh Congress,
in session at Philadelphia, was assuming Sovereign
authority, calling on Ireland to ' throw off the yoke ' of
England and enacting coercive measures against any
Colony that refused to join in the struggle. Under Howe
were John Burgoyne and Henry Clinton ; all three had
served with distinction in the late war, but Howe was
a bad selection for the Commandership-in-Chief. The
only way to end a Civil War is to fight it out like any
other war ; but Howe, like some of the Parliamentary
Generals in 1643-4, seems to have dreaded ' beating
the enemy too much,' and he had too much political
sympathy with the Colonial cause. North had, in fact,
none of the capacity of Pitt for choosing men ; his
appointment of Lord Sandwich to the Admiralty, and
his infinitely worse appointment of Lord George Ger-
maine (once, as Lord George Sackville, too well known
at Minden) to the Colonial Secretaryship, would alone
be enough to prove this. The man whom Congress
300 DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, 1776
selected for Commander-in-Chief of the American Army
was of a different temper from these persons. George
Washington was no theorist, no ardent Whig (the rebels
still called themselves ' Whigs of 1688 '), but simply a
patriotic gentleman of good Virginian family who con-
sidered the Colonists to be right in resisting by force.
He had the unselfish temper and the personal bravery
of a hero of romance ; and to these he added a patience
and a tact quite marvellous in the face of endless diffi-
culties and disappointments.
When he arrived at Boston in July, '75, the war had
already begun in earnest ; Howe had been thrice re-
pulsed in an attempt to clear a height that dominated
the city (Bunker's Hill), and had only succeeded when
the ammunition of the American riflemen was exhausted.
Early in '76 Howe was obliged to evacuate Boston
and to fall back on Halifax, whither he was followed
by streams of loyalists and British officials flying for
their lives. But on the other hand, an American
attempt to invade Canada in considerable force under
Benedict Arnold had been repulsed from the walls
of Quebec by a mere handful of British sailors and
French gentlemen, to the immortal honour of General
Carleton.
Meanwhile the [ third Continental Congress ' at
Philadelphia issued the Declaration of Independence of
the ' United States of America ' on July 4th, '76. Dis-
cussions tending in this direction had been going on
in pamphlets, pulpits, Assemblies and Congresses, ever
since the Stamp Act ; and in the main they turned
upon four points : j[i^ What is the origin of the ' Rights '
of a People ? (2) Do we Americans derive our rights
from ' Nature/ or from the Common Law of England,
OUR CHANCES OF SUCCESS 301
or from the original Charters granted to the Colonies ?
(3) I f these Rights are violated, have we the corollary
Right to renounce our allegiance to the Crown ? (4)
Have these Rights been violated ? In the Declaration
we decide in favour of a ' Natural ' origin of our Rights,
fortified by some assistance from Common Law ; we
decide unhesitatingly that King George has violated
these Rights in eighteen specified points ; and we invoke
the action of the Convention of 1689 to justify our Right
of Resistance. On these grounds we renounce King
George and proceed to pull down his statues. We do
not mention his repeated attempts at conciliation, nor
the savage acts of the recent reign of terror against
loyalists and officials in Boston or elsewhere. The
publication of this Document made war on a serious
scale inevitable. Let us consider the respective chances
of success on the British and American sides.
The peace establishment of our Army was in 1776
somewhat under 50,000 men, inclusive of garrisons in
Ireland, West Indies, Gibraltar and Minorca ; that of
the Navy, about 20,000 sailors. In time of war it
was reckoned that we could just about double the
Army and rather more than treble the Navy. 1 We
could also hire considerable numbers of Hessian troops.
But to this last, as well as to the increase of our
native Army, the Opposition in Parliament continually
raised the old cry about an ' engine of despotism.'
Even really intelligent Whigs, like Horace Walpole,
surprise us by writing in their private letters, that
they have no doubt that King George intends to
1 As a matter of fact, by the end of the war, the number of
Seamen and Marines in the Service had increased sixfold, from
18,000 to 110,000.
302 TREASONABLE ATTITUDE OF THE WHIGS
abolish the liberties of England by means of a Standing
Army — in fact, that the liberties of England are already
as good as abolished ; whereas the truth is that, if
these liberties were in any serious danger, it was
from Horace's friends in Parliament rather than from
poor stupid George. Recruits might also be raised,
and were raised, among the loyalist Americans, and
did good service ; but, on the whole, we never had at
any epoch of the war much above 40,000 British
soldiers across the Atlantic ; brave men, led by officers
decidedly superior, on the whole, to the American
leaders. Clinton, Rawdon and Burgoyne were all men
of real military merit, and Cornwallis afterwards proved
himself a man of talent ; their plans of campaign, though
constantly thwarted by the incompetent Colonial Secre-
tary, who was continually sending them self-contradictory
instructions, were well drawn ; e.g. Howe's plan of
holding the line of the Hudson, and so cutting off New
England from the Centre and the South, was perfectly
sound. But the lessons taught in the late war by the
elder Howe, by Forbes and by Bradstreet, were wholly
thrown away on the British War Office ; Thomas Atkins
was still an amorphous lobster, loaded with all the
horrible rigidities of an intolerable uniform, and only a
few independent companies, raised in the South during
the later years of the struggle, were brave enough to
insist on clothing themselves sensibly. Finally, the
British Army, with all its valour, was the constant butt
of one of the fiercest campaigns of factious opposition
ever heard in Parliament. Even Chatham and BurJce
went, and as far as one can see entirely from party and
selfish motives, quite beyond the bounds of legitimate
criticism, while young Charles Fox, son of the arch-
CHANCES OF AMERICAN SUCCESS 303
jobber, Henry Fox, and himself once a Tory and follower
of North's, spouted sheer treason and rejoiced over
every drop of British blood that was spilt like any modern
Irish M.P. Fox, ' a short, gross, fat man, with something
Jewish in his looks,' was the ablest debater of his own
or any other day. " Burke's mind," says John Courtenay,
" was electric, and on the least friction poured out a
stream of intellectual light ; but he took fire by his
own motion, and was often consumed by his own
splendour," and hence the bad taste which disfigured
many of his speeches. Is it to the credit of the Whigs
that they adopted for their ordinary party colours
the ' buff and blue,' which was the uniform of the
American rebels ?
America was hardly better equipped for the struggle.
Her two best generals were, in fact, General Space and
General Time ; it took three months to get question
and answer across the Atlantic. Her three millions
of people were scattered over an area so vast that no
European Army could conquer them, and still less could
one hold them if conquered : their bases of resistance
were everywhere ; our basis of attack was on the sea
alone ; if for a moment the control of that was lost
our Armies must be cut off in detail. That was what
eventually happened. Of the American generals, Arnold,
the ablest, turned traitor, Lee was at heart a traitor,
Gates was wholly incompetent, Nathaniel Greene alone
was a considerable strategist ; all perpetually intrigued
against Washington. The heart of the Colonists was
not in the struggle at all ; the thirteen States had no
bond of union, and wished for none. Congress did not
show itself worthy of the authority it assumed ; it was
an assembly of selfish jobbers and ranters, and would
304 WILL FRANCE HELP AMERICA?
neither feed, clothe nor pay its Army properly ; it was
profoundly jealous of the great man whom it had placed
in command of its troops ; it would not allow him to
enlist men for the whole period of the war lest ' a military
spirit ' should spring up. Each State, moreover, raised
a little Army of its own for local defence, and the chief
aim of each was to keep the main American Army far
from its borders. When that Army was victorious the
local Militia swarmed to its aid ; when it was likely to
be defeated the local Militia dispersed. To the Colonial
side belongs the discredit of first calling upon the Red
Men to come to aid (April, '75), and the pious mission-
aries of New England were the agents in the job ; but
in July England followed suit, and the employment of
the savages was soon quite avowed on each side. The
British reaped the greater benefit therefrom (and there-
fore the greater obloquy in history) because the Indians
knew well that it was the British Government alone
that had tried to protect them against the Colonists.
Probably at no time did the whole American forces
seriously outnumber the British, though they were
nearly always in greater force "at strategic points. The
danger really was lest the revolt should collapse of itself,
and it was very nearly doing so in the last moment of
the war when victory was at hand.
Now it seems to me that the British Government might
well have listened to Chatham upon one point. That
mighty hooked nose of his was for ever snuffing the tainted
gale that blew from Paris ; that France was about to
take advantage of our extremity was to him a certainty.
If she should do so the whole plan of campaign in America
would have to be modified, and our true policy would
then have been to confine ourselves to a naval blockade
SARATOGA, 1777 305
of the Colonial coast and to the occupation of one or two
strategic points on that coast. But in grasp of foreign
politics North, and in the direction of warfare Germaine,
were Ministers of, let us say, almost Gladstonian incom- (
petence ; and they not only turned an entirely blind eye
to France, but proposed to involve the British Army in
at least three separate sets of operations in America.
The main effort was to be made, and rightly, on the line
of the Hudson river, which was to be occupied both from
New York and from Canada ; but at the same time naval
expeditions were to be sent to raid the coast towns, and,
before either of these had borne fruit, the Southern
Colonies were to be occupied in great force. Howe
indeed began well, and compelled Washington, early
in the autumn of '76, to evacuate New York ; this
accomplished, he ought to have thought only of effect-
ing his junction with Burgoyne, who was to come
down the Hudson from Canada as quickly as possible.
Instead of keeping his eyes on this, Howe spread him-
self widely into New Jersey, and began to threaten
Pennsylvania, with the idea of frightening away the
members of Congress. Washington hung all the winter
on his flank in New Jersey, and in December defeated
his left at Trenton ; and it was not till the following
August that Howe succeeded, after beating him at the
Brandy wine river, in occupying Philadelphia. .Mean-
while Burgoyne had started from Canada in July, 'yy,
and recaptured Ticonderoga, Gates and Arnold slowly
retreating before him. Lo and behold ! when he got
into American territory, there was nfc Howe to meet
him. In such circumstances Burgoyne, harassed by
clouds of Militia at every step and accompanied by a
preposterous baggage- train, could barely make fifty miles
VOL. III. 20
306 FRANCE WILL HELP AMERICA, 1778
a month ; when he reached Saratoga he found his
communications cut behind him. On October 6th he
decided to retreat ; ten days later he surrendered with
4,800 starving men.
The effect of this disaster was far greater in Europe
than in America, and it was greatest of all in France.
Louis XV. had been dead over three years ; and French
society, released from his leaden weight, was all alive
with the anticipation of a golden age. The dull and
amiable young King was a cypher, but Vergennes, the
last statesman of Old France, was at his elbow, a man
with a talent for Coalitions. The charming Queen was
for ever asking news of ' our good Americans/ ' our dear
Republicans,' and dancing on a volcano, beneath which
the grim dwarfs were even then forging republican blades
for that queenly neck. The darling of Paris society,
Beaumarchais, in the intervals of writing comic opera,
was going round, hat in hand, for subscriptions for the
dear Republicans ; and these, with arms and volunteers,
were being secretly smuggled across the Atlantic. In
June, '76, Silas Deane arrived in Paris as an agent of Con-
gress, and, though officially refused, was secretly given
200 cannon and 25,000 stands of arms. In December
Franklin himself arrived, and became the lion of the
hour. " What a spectacle ! " as Mr. Carlyle says, " the
sons of the Saxon puritans, sleek Silas, sleek Benjamin,
here on such errand among the light children of Heathen-
ism, Monarchy, Sentiment alism and the Scarlet Woman ! "
All through '77 English ships were sporadically picking
up contraband French cargoes on their way to America :
in July Vergennes demanded their restoration, and began
to man his ships at Toulon and Brest ; and, at the news
of Saratoga, France hastened to conclude (February, 'y8)
SPAIN AND HOLLAND DECLARE WAR, 1779-80 307
a Treaty of Commerce and a defensive Alliance with the
United States of America. If England shall declare war
on France, this Alliance shall become offensive. America
shall in future live on French manufactures instead of
on English (' a splendid stroke for us,' thought the woollen
weavers of Rouen and the silk weavers of Lyons — they
little knew the wily Yankee I). 1 America shall not touch
the French West Indies ; but France shall touch as many
of the English West Indies as she can get. There shall
be no truce or peace with Britain without consent of both
parties to this contract. In the same year France pub-
lished to Europe a Declaration in favour of the rights of
Neutral Powers trading at sea. Why should England,
because she happens to have a big Navy, stop you Dutch-
men, you Swedes, Russians, Prussians, from trading
where you please even if you do carry gunpowder to
Boston ? Why should she call ship-timber, pitch and
even corn ' contraband of war ' ? And to Spain Vergennes
said, ' Come ! quick ! let the house of Bourbon present a
solid front to the insolent Islanders.' And, in '79, Spain,
who perhaps might have remembered that her own vast
Colonies were not without commercial grievances against
her, and that those who live in glass houses would -do
well to refrain from stone-throwing, lumbered into war ;
1 After the Peace of 1783 Adam Smith's predictions were largely
verified. He had strongly denounced the monopoly of the Colonial
trade which Britain reserved to herself, and said that, without
that monopoly, we should probably retain all the American
trade ; and so it proved. No Commercial Treaty was concluded
between Britain and America till 1794, and the Treaty of 1778
with France was not actually annulled till 1800, but after 1783
it was a dead letter. The Americans naturally turned to their old
correspondents in Bristol and London and bought British goods
as before the war.
308 WHAT FRANCE EFFECTED, 1778-81
and in 1780 Holland followed suit, and the Northern
Courts signed a document called the Armed Neutrality,
declaring that they agreed with Vergennes and would
no longer permit Great Britain to search their ships
at sea. 1
Sick as the old Sea-Queen was of an acute attack of
inflammation of the Parliament, this Coalition woke some
of her leaders to their better senses. Chatham's last
breath was expended (1778) in denouncing France as the
one foe to be fought by land and sea, and the task of
openly supporting the enemies of his country lay thence-
forth almost wholly on the shoulders of poor Fox. The
actual assistance afforded by France to her Allies on the
American Continent was, in mere numbers of men, not
very great. Twice the French Admirals succeeded in
throwing at critical moments on to the coast a few
thousand excellent troops, who, by the way, behaved
throughout the struggle with a discipline and a self-
restraint which contrasted very favourably with that
of the British at this period, and still more favourably
with the behaviour of French soldiers in Europe during
the wars of the Revolution. It was, however, rather
by diverting the British Fleet to home waters, and, in
company with their Spanish Allies, to the West Indies,
that France really saved the situation for America. If
at the beginning she had also sent a powerful Squadron
to the East Indies she would have done even better,
but this she omitted to do till 1781. And, long before
1 Little came of this. Katharine, Czarina of Russia, knew the
value of British markets for her Empire, and after some diplomatic
fuss the other Northern Powers danced to her piping. Holland
was more dangerous to us as a Neutral than as an enemy ; she
had been the main carrier of American produce during the first
part of the war.
CORNWALLIS AND CLINTON 309
any French Fleet arrived in American waters, Washing-
ton had passed through a terrible winter (1777-8) at
Valley Forge near Philadelphia, where, bulldog-like, he
held out against cold, starvation, desertion, intrigue and
neglect, while Howe was idling away his time in such
gaieties as the Quaker City could afford. In May, 'j8,
Clinton took over Howe's command, and fell back upon
New York with the intention of trying the Hudson
Valley plan again ; and, while collecting forces for this
purpose, he kept his men awake by frequent raids to
his left in the direction of Virginia. Then the French
Admiral d'Estaing, who ought never to have been allowed
to escape from Toulon, was skilfully prevented by our
Admiral Lord Howe (brother of the General) from forcing
an entrance to New York, and was obliged to sail away
to the West Indies. Lord Howe had really done well ;
he was in force considerably inferior to d'Estaing, and
he ' saved the situation ' for two years to come. But
then Germaine's orders induced the fatal mistake of a
division of strength. In the autumn a fresh British
force arrived by sea and seized Savannah, the Capital
of the Southernmost Colony, Georgia ; Clinton went
in '79 (also by sea) to strengthen it, and captured
Charleston early in 1780 ; he then returned to New
York, leaving Lord Cornwallis and Rawdon to reduce
the vast and hot provinces of the two Carolinas, where
they had to meet in Greene a strategist of great merit.
The British won a victory (over Gates, not over Greene)
at Camden, but suffered serious reverses at King's
Mountain and Cowpens — the latter in January, 1781.
But the permanent occupation of the South would
have done little to crush the Northern centres of revolt
unless Virginia also could be subdued, or unless Clinton
310 Y0RKT0WN, 1781
could keep touch all along the coast line with Corn-
wallis ; and Clinton, having never abandoned the idea
of reoccupying the Hudson valley, found himself unequal
to the dual task. Yet, while Clinton was absent in the
South in 1779, Washington's Army was so shockingly
neglected by its paymasters that it was able to undertake
no serious operation in the North ; the cleverest of his
lieutenants, Arnold, was preparing to betray the key of
the Northern position (West Point) to Clinton, when his
treachery was detected and Clinton was forced to look
Southwards again.
The end was not far off. All '79-80 the British Fleet
was more and more called away to the West Indies,
and was soon to be called away to the East Indies too.
Six thousand more Frenchmen had escaped the un-
vigilant Admiral Graves and landed on Rhode Island,
that is, in Clinton's rear. A glance at the map will
show how the great estuaries of the Delaware and other
mighty rivers cut up the coast, how protracted any march
along that coast must be, how easily defensible are the
lowest possible points of river-crossing, and therefore how
completely the Generals depended upon instant and
intelligent co-operation of the Navy. Twice Cornwallis
started Northward to get in touch with Clintorf^on the
former occasion (March, '81) he just won a desperate
battle over Greene at Guilford, but had to fall back to
recruit ; at last a junction with one of Clinton's raiding-**
parties was effected in Virginia, but the Frenchmen,
Fleet and Army together, were hanging on their flanks,
while our Fleet was ' refitting ' in New York. De Grasse
brought three thousand fresh French troops ; Washington
and the French General Rochambeau hurried to join
them with every man they could levy. The result was
WEAKNESS OF NORTH'S GOVERNMENT 311
that Cornwallis, with 7,000 men, was blockaded, on a
narrow peninsula at Yprktown, both by land and sea.
Hood from the West Indies and Clinton from New York
strained every nerve for relief, but Graves' Fleet, after
being once beaten off, found itself, on its second arrival,
a week too late. After less than a month's siege Corn-
wallis capitulated on October 19th. " Oh God ! it is all
over," said Lord North when he heard the news ; it was
indeed a disaster almost unparalleled in British history.
We hastened to evacuate the Southern Ports, and in
1782 New York alone remained in British hands. Hardly
another shot was fired in America, and only the pledge
that Congress had given to France prevented the im-
mediate conclusion of a Peace between England and the
United States. England had in fact missed her one
chance in 1778. It was then that Lord North vainly
implored George to allow him to resign, and to substitute
Chatham ; and it is just possible that Chatham might
have saved to us a nominal tie with our Colonies by with-
drawing all troops from America, beating France into
complete surrender at sea, and then turning to the
Americans and abolishing all vexatious laws, even the
Act of Navigation. But even so he must have given, or
procured compensation for the loyalists, and to that the
rancorous American politicians would never have assented.
Lord North's Government had been tottering long
before the Yorktown disaster ; of his East^ Indian and
Irish troubles I shall write in other chapters ; the
' Irish Question,' which has wrecked so many Govern-
ments, now first became a burning one, and was of itself
enough to upset a stronger man than North. The Whigs,
New and Old, were also raising a fierce cry for * economic
reform ' ; they profoundly resented the successful cor-
312 THE GORDON RIOTS
ruption of their darling electorate and their darling
House of Commons by King George, for they naturally
wished for a monopoly of that corruption for themselves.
One of their cleverest leaders, Mr. Dunning, produced
and actually carried in 1780 a motion " That the influence
of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to
be diminished " ; very plain speaking. Their great orator
Burke thundered in many like words. The slender
Catholic Relief Bill of 1778, which freed British subjects
who said Mass from the penalties of high treason, pro-
duced a frightful outbreak of mob violence in London,
which was headed by a madman called Lord George
Gordon. The mob and even the authorities had got a
strange notion that the employment of troops was illegal
until the Riot Act had been read ; it takes an hour to
read this invaluable document, and no magistrate could
be found to risk his life for an hour. The King was
probably as ignorant of the real law of the case as his
mob or his magistrates ; but he had undaunted courage,
and he bade his soldiers shoot, law or no law. 1 And so,
after four days, the mob was dispersed at the cost of
several hundred lives, twenty-nine ringleaders were
hanged, and ' more people were found dead in the streets
near empty brandy casks than were killed by the musket- '
balls.' When a mob next occupies helpless London,
perhaps with a more specious and ' philanthropic ' crV
than ' No Popery/ let us hope a King will be found as
plucky and as sensible as stout Farmer George.
1 We know at last, from Professor Dicey's explanation of the
case of Rex v. Pinney (1831), that it is the legal duty of every
subject, whether civilian or soldier, to maintain order at all
costs, if necessary by gunpowder, whether the Riot Act has
been read or not.
THE NAVAL WAR, 1778 313
And, besides these disagreeable interludes, North had
got a league of Spain, France and Holland against him
in the Old World as well as in the New. The maritime
war that ensued has one great interest from the fact of
its having been purely a maritime war. A lesser states-
man than Vergennes might easily have allowed European
complications to tie his country's hands to her Eastern
frontier ; and perhaps a greater statesman than Lord
North might have stirred up troubles there for France.
The French Fleet now numbered eighty sail of the line,
ship for ship of deeper draught, better model and greater
weight of broadside than the nominal hundred and fifty
of the British ; Choiseul had set on foot a special force
\ of ten thousand * seamen-gunners,' and there was no
! difficulty in manning the French Fleet with excellent
sailors and skilled superior officers ; what it lacked was
good lieutenants and ensigns. The Spaniards, when they
joined in, could contribute sixty ships, by no means in
a state of high efficiency. The numerical superiority
of the British counted for very little in view of the
enormously wide distribution of our forces that was
deemed necessary. 1 Apart from the East^ Indies, which
had little influence on the rest of the struggle, though
the fighting there was most fierce and glorious on both
sides, there was the American coast to hold, the West
Indian trade to be protected, Gibraltar and Minorca to
be defended, the home waters to be guarded against
1 As the war went on it became increasingly difficult to man
the British Navy, in spite of the fact that the pressgang was
continually at work. An amusing instance of its methods is
noticed in the shape of a fully rigged ship on land at Tower Hill ;
the simple countryman visiting London is invited to walk on
board and inspect it, and immediately finds himself pressed for the
Navy (1782).
314 NAVAL STRATEGY
invasion, and, after 1780, those tiresome Neutrals in the
Baltic to be watched. Although we practically with-
drew from the Mediterranean and left Minorca to its
fate, we tried to keep to all the other points, and the
result was that our strategy was from the first both
defensive and defective. And for this Lord Sandwich
must be held mainly responsible. We should have done
better to abandon America, withdraw our Squadron
from the West Indies and follow Hawke's old plan of
watching for the big Fleets in the Bay of Biscay and
at the entrance of the Straits. On the other hand,
the Allies, strategically on the offensive, made in the
execution of their strategy a series of shocking mis-
takes, which ultimately left us victorious. Over and
over again — in the Channel, off Gibraltar, in the West
Indies — they were in considerably superior force to
detachments of the British Fleet, but the more they
looked at each detachment the less they liked the
task of attacking it. Every battle they fought was
a defensive one. Every French Admiral, d'Orvilliers,
de Guichen, d'Estaing, de Grasse, committed this fault,
and it was not a fault that could be committed with
impunity against men like Hood, Rodney and Howe ;
against a Hawke or a Nelson it would have spelt utter
ruin and annihilation. On the other hand, they did
immense damage to our commerce ; they picked up West
Indian isles with surprising skill and vigour, and, at the
critical moment, as we have seen, they saved Washington's
Army and the independence of America. As for the
Spanish Admirals, they hardly counted at all; and the
objects of the Allies, though they combined bravely to
besiege Gibraltar, were by no means one. France pre-
ferred to seize Windward Islands, while Spain naturally
DANGERS OF BRITAIN 315
thought most of recovering Jamaica, and also busied
herself with overrunning her old possession of Florida,
which had little effect on the campaign as a whole.
The war began with an indecisive battle, between
Admiral Keppel and the Frenchman d'Orvilliers, off
Ushant in July, 'j8, in which neither side took a
single ship ; and from that time for nearly a year
there was no serious fighting in European waters. War
was declared on Spain in June, '79, and a powerful
French and Spanish Fleet appeared in the Channel
shortly afterwards ; but, though a real coast-terror was
established and prizes made of many merchant ships,
neither battle nor landing was attempted ; it seemed
rather as if France had anticipated Napoleon's idea
of wearing England down by striking at her commerce.
Spain, however, at once began to blockade Gibraltar
from the land side, and, as the Government had
neglected to provision it adequately, the Rock under-
went, in this, its fourth siege, great hardships. One
thing, however, was done ; a real hero, George Eliott of
Stobs, afterwards Lord Heathfield, a born engineer, a
man who had been in every fight since Dettingen, and
withal a Scot, a vegetarian and a water-drinker, was sent
to defend it, and his three years' defence is one of the
most glorious events in our history. The first relief
was afforded to him by another hero of the late war,
Admiral George Rodney, who, on his way to the West
Indies in January, '80, took or sank nine out of eleven
Spanish ships in a fearful storm off Cape St. Vincent,
threw large stores on to the Rock, and even managed
to send a convoy through the Straits to revictual Port
Mahon in Minorca, to which also Spain was now turning
her attention. Again, a year later, a great combined
3 i6 ELIOTTS DEFENCE OF GIBRALTAR, 1778-81
Fleet under de Guichen failed to intercept a much smaller
force under Admiral Darby, who brought a second relief
to Gibraltar, then being heavily bombarded. De Guichen
thereafter showed himself off Torbay, fifty strong to
Darby's thirty ; it was madness on the part of the French-
man not to use this superior force ; yet, after cruising
in the entrance to the Channel for some five weeks, he
withdrew without even having cut off our West India
trade-ships, which had been his avowed objective. So
passed the year '8i ; and, though Minorca, after a strait
siege of six months and a long blockade, fell in the fol-
lowing February, the undaunted Eliott still kept his flag
flying. The greatest efforts were, however, made by the
Allies in the summer ; and in September an immense
and miscellaneous armament was gathered all round
Gibraltar — a mighty battery of three hundred guns on
the Isthmus, ten great rafts or floating batteries firing
red-hot shot (a new invention) from a hundred and
fifty mouths, three and thirty thousand men, eighty gun-
boats and sixty ships of the line — all against a starving
garrison of seven thousand, and all in vain. Eliott con-
trived to set fire to the floating batteries, and they blew
up with fearful loss all in one day ; the moral effect
of his resistance -was tremendous, and in October Lord
Howe, by superior seamanship and superior daring,
reinforced and revictualled Gibraltar, under their very
noses. This last relief practically closed the war in
Europe, and Rodney had already practically closed it
in the West Indies.
You will remember that in the summer of '78 Howe
had frustrated d'Estaing's attempt to take New York
by sea ; by November the Frenchman had gone to the
West Indies, just in time to see the English Admiral
THE WEST INDIAN CAMPAIGNS 317
Barrington seize the very important post of St. Lucia,
yet not too late to fight him, had he been minded to do
so. But d'Estaing preferred to pass on, and to add St.
Vincent and Grenada to Dominica, which had already
been seized for France by Marshal Bouille. This occupied
most of the year '79, and, early in '8o, de Guichen suc-
ceeded to d'Estaing's command, while Rodney, fresh
from his triumph over the Spaniards, came with a
loose sheet to the theatre of war with which he had
been so familiar in 1 761-2. Rodney at his best was
one of the most naturally brilliant seamen England
ever produced, and utterly fearless as to assuming
responsibility and as to acting without orders, but he
was sixty-seven years old and in shocking health, a
bitter enemy of the First Lord (Sandwich), and only
appointed to a command thus late in the war by
the personal insistence of King George. De Guichen
did indeed escape him in the spring of '80, but it was
because Rodney's captains failed to understand his
signals, which were for concentrated action on a particular
point of the hostile Fleet — a manoeuvre to which our
Navy was not then accustomed.
On receiving the news that Holland was now included
among our enemies, Rodney fell upon- the rich Dutch
islands of St. Eustace and St. Martin, and seized
enormous booty there ; they had been the great depot
of contraband goods. 1 He also sent Sir Samuel Hood
(afterwards Lord Hood) to blockade the greatest of the
1 " St. Eustace," said Rodney, "did England more harm than
all the arms of her enemies, and has alone supported the American
Rebellion." But he committed a grievous mistake in staying too
long at this Island instead of flying at de Grasse when he arrived
on the station.
318 RODNEY'S VICTORY, 1782
French Windward Islands, Martinique, which had always
been a nest of privateers. Early in '81 appeared a
new French Admiral, de Grasse, who, after skilfully
effecting the relief of Martinique, passed on, without
attacking Hood, and seized Tobago. On receiving news
of the dangers threatening his American Allies the
Frenchman hurried, in July, to Chesapeake Bay, and
was absent from the West Indies between July and
October, helping to finish off Lord Cornwallis at York-
town. 1 Rodney's health had obliged him to return to
England k>r a few months, but, when de Grasse
returned Jo the West Indies, Hood, though in far
inferior force, managed to keep him busy till Rodney
reappeared in February, '82. The French and Spaniards
were now making great preparations for the reduction
of Jamaica, and Rodney was resolved to prevent their
junction at all costs. It was off the little Islands called
' the Saints,' between Dominica and Guadeloupe, that
the two Fleets at last met in a pitched battle. Rodney
on April 12th repeated his novel and daring tactics
of breaking the enemy's line at two separate points,
took the French flagship with de Grasse on board, and
four more first-rates, crippled the rest very severely,
and then, most unaccountably, omitted to follow up his
victory. 2 Hood thought, and said openly, we ought to
have taken twenty instead of five ships. But the French
West Indian efforts were spent, and there could be no more
1 De Grasse had twenty-eight sail of the line off Yorktown.
2 ' Our Chief he lay quiet, with good ships around him,
Some willing to move, but — the devil confound him —
He made no signal to chase, nor would let others go ' : —
So wrote one of Rodney's captains, Cornwallis, who afterwards
kept the great watch at Brest for two years before Trafalgar.
FALL OF NORTH, 1782 319
thought of attacking Jamaica. Then, a Whig Govern-
ment having come into power, Rodney was recalled,
not for letting de Grasse escape him while he dallied at
St. Eustace in 1781, not for failing to take twenty French-
men in this last battle, but for being a Tory !
And the war came to an end, not because the French
Navy was destroyed, for, except in the last battle it had
hardly suffered at all, but because the French Exchequer
was empty, and because North was quite readyjto give
the Americans their independence. It was not, however,
North but a new Prime Minister that began to treat for
Peace. General Conway, an ' Old Whig,' successfully
carried, in February, '82, a motion in the House of
Commons against continuing the war in America, and, in
March, North, in spite of the King's entreaties, resigned.
George made no allowance for his difficulties, roundly
told him he was deserting his post, and then vainly tried
to induce the ' New Whigs,' or followers of Chatham, to
form a Ministry under Lord Shelburne. But Shelburnq
was averse from this for the present, and told the King
that he must take all the Whigs he could get, New and
Old, and that of such an Administration only Rockingham
could be the head. Rockingham, Shelburne, Camden^
Dunning, Grafton, Conway, Fox and Burke, with Keppel
as First Lord of the Admiralty, did indeed represent a
powerful combination of Whig groups, but the King
kept in one Tory, the intriguing Lord Chancellor Thurlow,
and by his means sowed abundant discord among his
servants. And, like other ' broad-bottom ' Ministries,
this one was singularly weak in action, especially after
the death of its nominal head, the stupid Rockingham,
in July, '82. Indeed its main efforts were concentrated,
not on making Peace either with France or America, but
320 ROCKINGHAM AND SHELBURNE, 1782-3
on Irish and East Indian affairs, and on economic reform.
Mr. Burke brought in a Bill for abolishing a lot of sinecure
offices and other means of corruption, but, in effect, the
whole thing was whittled down to a saving of £70,000 a
year, mostly by mean economies in the King's Household.
Rockingham was succeeded as Prime Minister by Shel-
burne, whom, in spite of his abilities and his plausible
manners, no one, and least of all King George, really
trusted. Fox and Shelburne had already quarrelled
badly over the terms of the coming Treaties with France
and A*nerica ; each in fact had appointed his own
negotiator at Versailles, and Vergennes and Franklin had
cajoled them both. So, on Shelburne's appointment to
the Treasury, the leading ' Old Whigs,' including Fox and
Burke, resigned, and, at the age of twenty-three, William
Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham, became
Shelburne's Chancellor of the Exchequer ; two other
young men, Henry Dundas of Arniston and William
Grenville, subsequently to be Pitt's right-hand men,
now first entered the Ministry.
It seems to have been an honest Ministry, and one
which might have concluded a satisfactory Peace.
Shelburne was at least a man of ideas, a free trader and
a reformer of all real abuses, without being at this time
in the least a Radical ; even in after years he defended
Warren Hastings, whom Tories and Whigs alike immolated
on the altar of party ; he fought tooth and nail, in the
American negotiations, for the cause of the loyalists
against the unctuous rancour of Franklin ; and it was
he 1 who now once more prevented the cession of Gibraltar
1 At least, so said Shelburne, but there is some evidence the
other way. Pitt certainly fought hard against the proposal to
cede the Rock.
THE INFAMOUS COALITION, 1783 321
in exchange for some trumpery West India island or
other ; the King had been quite ready to cede it. But
what is the use of an honest Ministry if two political
parties, not a month ago bitter enemies, suddenly coalesce
against it in the House of Commons ? This was what
happened, to the amazement of the world, in the spring
of '83, before any definite Peace had been signed. On
February 14th Fox, out of mere personal spite to Shel-
burne, suddenly asked for a private interview with Lord
North ; and, to the eternal disgrace of the latter, the
two laid their heads and their followers together, and
carried a vote of censure on the Ministry. No principle
whatever was involved ; only the most barefaced want
of principle on the part of both the criminals. King
George's fury may easily be imagined, but Shelburne was
obliged to resign on February 24th, and, as the King
refused for two months to have anything to say to the
conspirators, there was, until April, no Ministry in Eng-
land. Then at last George gave way ; under the nominal
headship of the Duke of Portland, Fox and North, as
Secretaries of State, divided the spoils of office and the
fruits of bribery ; and it was this Government that con-
cluded the final ' Treaty of Versailles ' in September,
1783. By this Peace Great Britain ceded three of her
gains of 1763, namely Florida to Spain, Senegal (on the
West African coast) and Tobago to France ; two of her
recent acquisitions, Goree and St. Lucia, also to France ;
and, worst of all, one of her precious gains of 1713, Minorca,
to Spain. She recovered the other West Indian isles
that France had taken — Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica
and St. Kitts. She allowed Dunkirk to be fortified.
With America a provisional agreement had been con-
cluded nine months before, and this was now incorporated
VOL. III. 21
322 THE PEACE OF VERSAILLES, 1783
in the Treaty ; England renounced the policy of North's
Quebec Act, and gave the whole Ohio and Mississippi
district to the United States ; she admitted the Americans
to a share in the Newfoundland fishery, and accepted a
vague unguaranteed promise that Congress would restore
their landed property in America to ' such British sub-
jects as had not borne arms ' ; this was all that was
promised to the suffering loyalists, and not an acre of
this was ever restored. A charming story, current at
the time, may fittingly close the history of the Thirteen
Colonies. Vergennes was entertaining at dinner, on the
night of the signature of the Treaty, Mr. Richard Oswald
and Mr. Benjamin Franklin, the plenipotentiaries for
the respective Governments of Great Britain and
America ; and he, as in duty bound, proposed the
health of his own sovereign " Louis XVI., who, like
the Sun in Heaven, illumines, etc., etc." Finding the
role of the Sun occupied, Mr. Oswald, in proposing
George III., could only compare him to the Moon (who
rules the tides and so rules the sea) ; whereupon
Franklin rose — and one can forgive even Franklin much
for it — and added, "And I give you the health of
George Washington, who, like Joshua of old, said to
the Sun and to the Moon, ' Stand ye still/ and they
obeyed him." In truth the best laurels reaped in this
unsatisfactory contest were those which adorned the
brow of George Washington.
CHAPTER IX
THE PILOT
King George's popularity with his people dates from the
years 1783-4. The Coalition of Fox and North was such
a manifest attempt to secure the spoils of office for mere
personal and party ends that its leaders were rightly held
to have forfeited all claim to honour and consideration,
and the King, by refusing them all private audiences, by
refusing to create any Peers for them, and by limiting
himself to the barest official communications with them,
took a line that commended itself to all reasonable men.
If he took advice from any one at this time it was from
Lords Temple and Shelburne, and perhaps from Lord
Thurlow, who still remained Chancellor, as he had been
under North, Rockingham and Shelburne. George made,
however, at least one overture to young Mr. Pitt.
The Coalition, when in, did nothing even ostensibly
Whiggish ; it had come in on a vote of censure on
Shelburne's Peace negotiations, but then proceeded to
conclude Peace, as we have seen, exactly on Shelburne's
lines. As for ' Economic Reform,' the old cry of Fox
and Burke, it did absolutely nothing, and the only great
measure it produced was a Bill for the better government
of India, which we shall discuss in another chapter. On
this Bill it was wrecked. Its great majority in the Lower
House enabled it of course to carry anything there, but
the King used his personal influence to procure the rejec-
323
324 THE KING AND THE COALITION, 1784
tion of this India Bill in the House of Lords. In doing
so he undoubtedly violated a ' Convention of the Con-
stitution ' and one of the oldest Privileges of Parliament,
according to which the Sovereign may not ' take notice
of any proceeding depending in either House/ i.e. not
until such proceeding is presented to him in the form of
a Bill for his acceptance or rejection. ' Conventions of
the Constitution ' are, however, matters liable to variation,
and to various interpretation from age to age, and most
of the Privileges of Parliament are mere ' Conventions.'
George violated no Statute ; and, as he ' could do no
wrong/ it would have to be presumed that some other
person had done the wrong by advising him to act as he
did. Fox ought to have impeached some person — say
Temple, Shelburne or Thurlow — for giving the King
advice to violate Privilege of Parliament ; had he felt
strong enough he would probably have done so. But,
directly the India Bill was rejected by the Lords, the
King contemptuously dismissed his Ministers and gave
the Treasury to young William Pitt (December, 1783).
Pitt took office in that month with a large majority of
the House of Commons against him, and did not dissolve
Parliament until the following March ; in doing so he and
the King violated, in the most open manner, another
Convention of the Constitution, 1 and showed thereby
that such Conventions can be successfully violated. It
1 Namely that a Minister who has a clear majority of the House
of Commons against him ought to resign office. There are, it is
true, two recent instances of a newly appointed Minister confront-
ing a hostile majority in the House of Commons without at once
dissolving, but in each case the dissolution has been deferred only
to suit the convenience of the electors, not that of the Ministers.
Perhaps it may even be argued that, in 1784, no such Convention
existed.
WILLIAM PITT'S MINISTRY 325
is always a dangerous game to play, for the electorate
may refuse to condone the Minister's action at the next
election. It was a very dangerous game to play then ;
though he was Chatham's son the Minister was quite
unknown outside Parliament, and the King was mainly
known to his people as a jobber of Parliaments. But
the Coalition was detested ; and it played its cards very
badly in trying to prevent a dissolution, the very thing
which at first, when the unconstitutional action was fresh
in men's minds, it ought to have courted. Pitt, on his
side, played the hand superbly ; the majorities against
him diminished day by day as the fury of their leaders
grew more fierce ; and, in March, a general election not
only condoned but endorsed in the heartiest manner
the violation of the two Conventions. One hundred and
sixty followers of Fox and North lost their seats, and
the Prime Minister entered, in the twenty-fifth year of
his age, on his eighteen-year-long tenure of power with
a vast majority at his back. The Whigs by their factious
conduct had condemned themselves to an exclusion from
Office that was to last for almost half a century.
To pass judgment on William Pitt is, for a writer so
ill-equipped with knowledge as myself, a frightful task,
especially when I reflect that the history of his times
yet remains to be written. To criticize him severely, in
view of what he did for Britain, would be like attacking
the character of Queen Victoria. Perhaps no man ever
gave his life so wholly to his country and gave his life
so wholly for his country. And the tragedy of that life
is awful ; he seemed born to lead us in the pleasant
paths of peace, retrenchment and moderate reform, in
which shepherding he showed a skill that has never been
equalled ; when we were at the acme of the prosperity
326 CHARACTER OF PITT
which he had given us and he at the height of his fame,
the French Revolution burst upon him and us, blew all
his plans to the winds, drove him to be a reactionary
in spite of himself, and killed him at the age of six-and-
forty, in the darkest hour of the fortunes of Europe,
which he had thrice armed against it in vain.
In private life and to his few intimate friends Pitt was
the most lovable and playful of companions ; in public life
the coldest and haughtiest of colleagues and Ministers ;
in both public and private integer vitce scelerisque purus
beyond all other statesmen. How with his upbringing
he escaped being a prig and a molly-coddle it is dim-
cult to understand. Chatham had trained him from his
infancy to be a parliamentary leader, and above all an
orator ; his earliest pleasure was listening to his father's
sonorous declamations in the Lords. But his natural
gifts and his devotion to duty took him far beyond the
scope of any training which Chatham could have de-
vised for him. He went to Cambridge at fifteen with
a tutor and, for he was very delicate, a nurse. He be-
came a finished Greek and Latin scholar, one of the best
of his age ; he became an orator far less dramatic, but,
because of his rooted common sense, infinitely more
persuasive than his father ; a parliamentary leader of
unrivalled power and grip, a past-master of all legal
and constitutional lore, and, above all, a financier of
supreme ability. Yet, as Machiavelli would have
said, the ' times were such ' that a year of Chatham —
Chatham the reckless spendthrift, the turgid declaimer,
the impossible colleague, Chatham the King-tamer, 1 the
France-hater, the galvanic inspirer of subordinates —
1 That Chatham was always ostentatiously humble in the King's
presence cannot blind us to the fact that he tamed George II.
PITT'S COLLEAGUES 327
might have annihilated the hydra of the French Republic
in its infancy and saved England twenty-three years of
war and six hundred millions of debt.
From his first entry as Premier Pitt towered above
his colleagues. And in truth they were not very tall men.
Lord Rosebery speaks of them as ' a procession of orna-
mental phantoms/ mostly in the Upper House. They
were untried, if not wholly unknown men. Pitt very
wisely would have nothing to do with Shelburne, a political
Jonah whom no one trusted, though many of Shelburne's
brilliant ideas remained with him. Henry Dundas,
though he ' enjoyed the singular felicity of not speaking
English,' was an able debater and Pitt's best supporter
in the Lower House. William Grenville was an able man,
a scholar even superior to Pitt himself, in middle life
a true patriot and a real European statesman, but
cursed with fearful pride, with still more fearful temper
and with a Whig family connection and tradition, which
obliterated, at the most critical moments, every dictate
of honour and gratitude to his leader. Thurlow remained
Chancellor till '92 and was an element of weakness in
the Cabinet, as he was always ready to intrigue with
the King or with his lesser colleagues. It must not be
supposed that George, on taking Pitt as his Minister,
turned over a new leaf and gave up jobbing ; far from
it ; he kept a party ' of King's friends ' in the House as
long as he kept his reason, and he spent at every general
election large sums in bribery. He thwarted Pitt on
many occasions, and we can well believe that he never
appreciated or liked his great Minister. But he kept
him in office simply because the one alternative was the
detested Fox. As Lord Rosebery well says, George's
letters to Pitt resemble ' those of a man in embarrassed
328 PITT'S FINANCIAL POLICY
circumstances to his family solicitor.' So, on nine occa-
sions out of ten, the King's friends received their orders
to support Pitt and obeyed them. As for Pitt himself,
not only was his whole life a protest against parliamen-
tary corruption, but he had no need of its aid. 1 If he
was on the whole not ill supported by George, he
was infinitely better supported by all the enlightened
classes of Great Britain. This is not to say that he
was uniformly successful in carrying his measures. His
majority was by no means a united body. On several
great questions, such as his prescient dread of the grow-
ing power of Russia, his excellent measure for a better
scheme of representation, his wise commercial policy
towards Ireland and America, and his zealous advo-
cacy of the abolition of the Slave Trade, he sustained
defeats, or only received lukewarm support. But these
defeats would only have been temporary, and this support
would no doubt have become sufficient, had the fifteen
years of peace, to which in 1792 he so confidently looked
forward, been granted to him. For the Nation, under his
wise guidance, was becoming more enlightened every day.
His financial policy was extraordinarily successful,
and may be briefly summed up. As Adam Smith's
scholar — " we are all your scholars," he said to him at
a dinner party in '87 — he realized that a greater revenue
may be obtained from a low duty upon any given article
than from a high one, for this will not only increase con-
sumption but will cut at the roots of smuggling, which
only the high duty makes profitable. The smuggling
trade was then at the height of its prosperity, and Pitt's
systematic reduction of duties on every import of luxury,
1 Indeed his financial reforms destroyed the most potent of its
original sonrces ; the enormous number of sinecure offices,
PITT'S FINANCIAL POLICY 329
especially upon tea, wine and tobacco, swiftly ruined it.
He carried with ease the substitution, in the case of
these articles, of an Excise duty for a Customs duty, the
effort to carry which had so nearly upset Walpole in
1733. He carried with equal ease the great Customs
Consolidation Act, providing that all payments of duty
should be made on one set of schedules and to one Ac-
count at the Bank of England ; and thus he enormously
reduced the cost of collecting the revenue. He con-
tinued to widen the basis of taxation on the lines on
which North had begun to widen it, e.g. by his introduc-
tion of duties on probate of wills and legacies, and by
his numerous little and little-felt taxes, such as those
on men-servants, hair-powder and the like. He insti-
tuted a Sinking Fund on a far sounder basis than
Walpole's, for the reduction and ultimate abolition of the
National Debt. Finally his great Treaty of Commerce
with France in 1786, by which England was to admit
French wines, oil and brandy, and France to admit British
woollens and hardwares, on the lowest possible scale of
reciprocal duties, marked the first step towards open
Free Trade ; and the Treaty was accompanied by wise
political provisions for the protection in each country
of property belonging to subjects of the other. 1 The
result of all these great measures was that in eight years
Pitt saw the ' Funds ' go up from 57 to 96 ; the Debt of
250 millions reduced by 10 millions ; an annual deficit
of three millions converted into an annual surplus, in-
creasing at compound interest and devoted to the further
1 Fox of course denounced the Treaty, and, by an astonishing
volte-face, called the French, now that they were the friends of
his own country, ' our natural enemies.' However, they soon
went to war with us, so that he was again able to regard them as
his friends.
330 TOWARDS FREE TRADE
reduction of that Debt ; the accounts of the Nation, for
the first time in history, properly kept and properly
audited ; the revenue increased from twelve to sixteen
millions, and both exports and imports increased in
the same proportion. All this represented a prodigious
amount of labour over statistics, in which he was well
assisted by William Eden, Lord Auckland, Charles Jen-
kinson, afterwards Earl of Liverpool, and his own cousin
William Grenville, afterwards Lord Grenville.
Among his successes the great East India Bill of 1784,
mainly the work of Henry Dundas, will be treated else-
where ; elsewhere also will be treated the greatest of all
his measures, in which, owing to the jealousy of English
merchants, he suffered a cruel defeat — his scheme for
perfect free trade with Ireland. With America too he
desired perfect free trade, and this he might have carried
but for the jealousy of the West India merchants at
home, who refused to open the West Indian markets to
the United States. We can hardly reckon his Slave
Trade policy among his failures, for, though he failed
to abolish the infamous traffic, he never ceased to look
towards that goal ; the Bill of 1788 was the first Bill
that regulated and mitigated the horrors of the trade ;
he was defeated on the motion for immediate abolition
in 1792, but gradual abolition would have undoubtedly
been carried a year or two later but for the war, which
adjourned all reforms; 1 the wisest of the 'abolitionists,'
Wilberforce, believed in him to the last.
He was defeated also upon another great subject
1 It must be remembered that the French Republicans tried to
excite slave insurrections in our West Indian islands, 1794, and
that the massacre of the whites by the slaves of San Domingo,
1 79 1, was not calculated to soften the feelings of white men
towards blacks.
PARLIAMENTARY REFORM 331
upon which his heart was set — such an improvement
of the representative system as is commonly called a
■ Reform Bill.' This he had twice brought forward in his
first years in Parliament, and he moved it again in 1785.
It was a hereditary task ; Chatham had prophetically
talked about the necessity for the House of Commons
reforming itself, ' or it would be reformed with a
vengeance from without.' No more fitting task could
be conceived for a peace Minister in quiet times. The
anomalies of the old representative system were ludicrous,
and were a fruitful source of corruption. The ancient
and honourable Borough of One-vote returned, on the
nomination of the Duke of Rottenburgh, and by the
mouth of its free, fat and dependent burgess Mr.
Christopher Corporate, two Members to Parliament ;
and hard by was the populous City of No- vote. The
Borough, as readers of Peacock will remember, stood in
the middle of a heath, and consisted of a solitary farm,
of which the land was so poor that it would not have
been worth the while of any human being to cultivate it,
had not the Duke found it very well worth his to pay
his tenant for living there, in order to keep the honour-
able Borough in existence. Mr. Christopher Corporate,
in giving his vote for his two Members, did, in fact, elect
a three-hundredth part of the Legislature ; and was the
'quintessence and abstract of thirty-three thousand six
hundred and sixty-six people.' ! Such anomalies were
perfectly well known ; there was Gatton, and there
was Old Sarum, for which last the elder Pitt himself
1 Peacock's figures were slightly out, both as to population and
as to numbers of the House of Commons, even at the date at
which ' Melincourt ' was written (18 17), but I have not thought it
worth while to vary them.
332 THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
had once sat, and for which the extreme Radical, John
Horne-Tooke, was one day to sit. More than one-third
of the Lower House was returned on the nomination of
a few territorial magnates. Recently the King had
acquired a substantial number of boroughs. Instances
of bribery and corruption, as flagrant as those of
some Guardians of the Poor in modern London, had
occasionally been exposed ; the Mayor and Corpora-
tion of Oxford had been in prison for it in 1768,
and, while there, had effected a successful sale of their
votes. Sudbury had put itself up to auction to the
highest bidder. In England there were about 300,000
electors in a population well over seven millions ; in
Scotland the proportion was even more ridiculous — e.g.
in the County of Bute there was the one famous elector
who elected himself. One does not need to multiply
instances, but it is obvious both that the Members failed
to represent their constituents and that the Constituencies
failed to represent the Nation. The system has been
defended tpon various grounds, never more strangely
than by Burke on the ground of its ' sacredness,' and
by Canning, in later days, on the ground of its ' elas-
ticity.' But the best defence, and it is, in fact, a suffi-
cient one, is that it secured, as no democratic system
ever can secure, the representation of the intelligence
of the Nation. The nomination boroughs afforded the
only chance for young men of ability without family
connections to enter Parliament. Burke, both Pitts,
Canning and Gladstone, were all nominees of great
men. The last of these maintained, in the hearing of
the present writer, that England was never better
governed than in the last age of the old unreformed
Parliament. People are too apt to forget that all real
RISE OF RADICALISM 333
substantial reforms proceed from intelligence alone,
that intelligence is always in a minority, and that
Democracy sacrifices not only intelligence but all the
reforms that can only proceed therefrom, in order to
maintain itself and to split political power into frag-
ments more and more minute.
A great impulse had been given to the idea of a
reformed system at the time of the Wilkes riots, when
it became the fashion to petition Parliament, on this
and other subjects, on a great scale. Wilkes himself
had brought forward a very sensible Reform Bill. All
sorts of kindred ideas were in the air — e.g., could con-
stituents interfere to control the votes of their elected
representatives ? Mr. Burke had lost his seat for Bristol
for protesting against the novel and disastrous doctrine
that they could. But Burke, great political philo-
sopher as he was, was a bad advocate of a cause, and
had gone out of his way to defend even the rottenest
system of rotten boroughs; " touch not," he said, " the
venerable fabric of the Constitution " ; and the Old
Whigs followed Burke at this time, for they well knew
that their strength lay in the rotten boroughs. Pub-
licity or secrecy of debate was another much vexed
question. In 1772 the House had embarked on a long
quarrel with certain printers who published accounts
of the debates. There was a ' Strangers' Gallery,' to
which shorthand writers occasionally got admission by
paying the doorkeeper a guinea per session, but it
was always liable to be closed at the demand of any
member. Another favourite subject for discussion was
the duration of Parliaments ; Chatham had thought
that corruption would be mitigated by a Triennial Bill ;
the Duke of Richmond was always moving for Annual
334 PITT'S REFORM BILL, 1785
Parliaments. The franchise was another such subject ;
was the ' forty-shilling freeholder ' to be for ever the
sole depository of it in the Counties ? were the strange
anomalies, according to which it varied in almost every
Borough, to continue ? Even the want of gravity in
that august assembly the House of Commons, was a
frequent subject of criticism ; an intelligent German
visitor was shocked, in 1782, to see honourable Members
stretched out on the benches, cracking nuts and eating
oranges. Clearly ' Reform ' was in the air.
Pitt, whose Bill of 1785 was defeated by seventy-four
votes, seems to me to have got the thing by the right
end. His immediate proposal was to disfranchise thirty-
six of the rotten Boroughs, and to add their members
to the County constituencies and to London. With the
franchise he did not propose to deal at present, except
that he would admit copyholders, still a fairly numerous
rural class, on the same footing as freeholders. But
the real merit in his scheme is that it included a system
for a gradual, almost an automatic transfer of repre-
sentation from the less populous to the more populous
constituencies. Had this been carried, accompanied
by an equalization (not a lowering) of the franchise, 1
the greatest evil of the nineteenth century, ' Reform
with a vengeance from without,' the baleful nostrum
of every agitator and demagogue, would have been
1 The franchise was already too low ; a freehold worth forty
shillings a year had meant something adequate in the reign of
Henry VI. ; it meant very little now. All the Reform Bills and
Redistribution Bills of the Nineteenth Century would have been
harmless, and even beneficial, had they not been accompanied by
successive lowerings of the franchise, each of which necessarily
meant more and more the supremacy of the ignorance over the
intelligence of the Nation.
DANGERS OF REFORM 335
avoided. But Whigs and ' King's friends ' combined to
defeat the measure ; no one in the Cabinet except Dundas
shared Pitt's views, and Pitt was never able to bring
it forward again. " One does not rebuild one's house,"
said Mr. Windham, " in the hurricane season " ; and,
from 1793 till death, Pitt was trying to erect temporary
barricades against the worst hurricane in history. The
Cause of Reform, with a big C. and a big R., passed
into the hands of the very people who were trying to aid
the French in pulling down the house about Pitt's ears —
Fox, Grey, Bedford, Norfolk, Erskine — blind and deaf to
all considerations of national defence and national honour,
if only they could glut their vengeance on the hated
Tories. In season and out of season they insisted on it,
as they insisted on every measure that could hamper Pitt
— and they never could get fifty votes in their favour.
Pitt has been freely blamed by many writers for not
resigning office when he sustained this and other defeats,
for not making them, as would now be said, ' Govern-
ment questions.' He has been accused of truckling
to the King, as North did, of clinging to Office for its
own sake. Those who argue thus forget that the old
' corrupt ' and aristocratic House of Commons was a
body with a far more independent will of its own than
a modern one ; independent both of the Minister who
led it and the electors who elected it ; its majority
ardently wished Pitt to continue to lead it, but did
not, therefore, bind itself to accept all his measures.
They forget also the temper of the Nation.
Ask the Nation what it felt and feared in the crisis of
the Regency Bill — November, 1788, to March, 1789. On
Guy Fawkes' day George III. had an attack of insanity ;
it might or might not be permanent, but the worst was
336 THE REGENCY QUESTION, 1788
feared. The only possible Regent was the Prince of
Wales, afterwards George IV., a man of scandalous life,
reckless extravagance and bitter enmity to his father and
his father's friends. It does not speak well for Fox and
some other Whig leaders that they were hand-and-glove
with this abandoned young man, whom they had taught
to gamble, race and drink ; Fox had been, in fact, his
first corrupter ; Lord North had stood, even after the
Coalition, steadily aloof from him. It was certain that
if the Prince became Regent he would dismiss the present
Ministry, and instal Fox, if for no other reason, at least
to spite his father. Pitt, therefore, proposed to create
him Regent with certain restrictions. These restrictions
were that he was to create no Peers and grant no pensions
or places except during the King's pleasure, and that
the Queen was to have control of the King's person
and household. Obviously this did not mean that the
Prince might not dismiss Pitt and instal Fox, or any
other Minister he pleased ; indeed, Pitt made full pre-
paration for his own dismissal, and intended to resume
his practice at the Bar. But the restrictions would
ensure that, if the King recovered, he would not find
all Pitt's work of economic reform upset, and the old
jobbery of the Oligarchy restored. Fox took the line,
extraordinary in a professed ' Old Whig of 1688,' that
the Prince of Wales had an inherent hereditary right
to the Regency as, in the case of his father's death, to
the Crown. Pitt, exclaiming that he would ' un-Whig '
Fox for the rest of his life, showed that the Crown alone
is hereditary, the Regent a person for the Houses to
appoint and to limit as they pleased. Fox shifted his
ground, and declared that the Prince was willing to
wait till the Houses nominated him Regent, but fought
THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM 337
hard against the restrictions. The City of London,
and indeed the whole country, was in utter terror at
the prospect of losing its darling Minister, and of seeing
the corrupt ' old gang ' revelling in the spoils of office
and putting the clock back. Thurlow betrayed Pitt
and intrigued with Fox and the Prince. By mid-
February the Bill was all ready, and a Commission had
been prepared to affix the Great Seal to the Act creating
and limiting the Regent ; Fox thought ' we should be
in in a fortnight.' But already the King's symptoms
were better, and by March 10 he was well ; the joy of
the Nation was almost frantic. George had never done
anything half so popular as to come to his senses at
that crisis ; and he professed and occasionally showed a
good deal of gratitude to Pitt ; but it was not till '92
that the latter was able to dismiss the traitor Thurlow.
The year '91 was marked by an excellent Catholic Relief
Bill, which went a good deal farther than that which North
had accepted in 1778, and by the ' Quebec Government
Act,' granting a moderate measure of representative
government to those loyal colonists, the Canadians.
In the spring of '92 Pitt, in moving his Budget, which
greatly reduced the expenditure on the Army and
Navy, made the astonishing statement that \ there had
never been a time at which Great Britain could more
confidently look forward to fifteen years of peace.'
An astonishing statement indeed. For, alas ! the
picture of this golden age has another side. Pitt's
foreign policy had hitherto been as wise as his domestic.
His great Treaty with France had buried, it seemed for
ever, the tomahawk which his father had been so fond
of wielding against our ' natural enemies.' Our inter-
course with these dear foes had never been so close and
vol. in 22
33§ FOREIGN POLICY, 1784-91
so affectionate as between 1786 and 1789, and was not
to be so again until the reign of Edward VII. In spite
of that intercourse Pitt had rescued Holland from being
towed in the wake of France, and, by the clever diplomacy
of Sir James Harris, had concluded with her and
Prussia a Triple Alliance, which was making its weight
felt all over Europe. The absurd pretensions of Spain
to maintain her mare clausum in the North- West corner
of America, whither a Spanish ship had hardly ever
sailed, were defeated in 1790 by Pitt's instant armament
of a Fleet ; as in 1770, Spain now again appealed, but
appealed in vain to France, was obliged to ' climb down '
and allow the English occupation of a trading station
at Nootka Sound, which we now call Vancouver. Only
in the Near East Pitt had suffered a defeat. Here, too,
he was ahead of his age and was probably right, but he
could carry neither Cabinet nor Country with him. He
wished to interfere decisively to prevent the extension of
Russian power on the Black Sea (1791) at the expense
of Turkey ; a British Squadron sent to the Baltic could
undoubtedly have checked this, and Pitt knew well that
Russia already had designs not merely on Constantinople
but on India as well. But no one else in England would
believe this, and the Russian trade was reckoned far too
valuable to be risked on such grounds. 1 The rebuff was
a serious one for British prestige and Pitt felt it acutely,
but it was certainly not a cause for him to resign office.
Meanwhile the real Storm was brewing in Paris.
1 Fox, according to a story often denied but never disproved,
went the length of sending a private friend, Sir Robert Adair,
to St. Petersburg, to intrigue with Russia against the British
Ministry, and thereby incurred the guilt of high treason.
END OF VOL. Ill
1
\J
i
INDEX
Peers will be found under their family names with a reference from
their titles ; Peeresses and foreign nobles under their titles.
Aberdeen, 260, 274
' Abhorrers,' name of Tories, 47
Abingdon, Earl of, see Bertie
Abjuration, Oath of, 107, 108
'Abraham,' 'Plains of,' 212
' Absalom and Achitophel,' 53
Acadia, 143 and note, 189, 190,
191, 193, 194.197
Act of Security, Scottish, 254
Act of Settlement, the, 95, 108,
109, 252
Act of Uniformity, 1662, 23
Acts of Supremacy (Scottish),
229, 236, 239, 247
Adair, Sir Robert, 338 (note)
Adams, Samuel, 291, 297
Addison, Joseph, 96, 112, 115,
116
Admiralty, Prince James at the,
29
Africa, Dutch rivalry in, 28
— , West coast of, 209, 224, 321
African Company, the, 9 (note),
114
Agincourt, Battle of, 127
Ailsa Craig, 276
Aire, 138
Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 184,
185
Albemarle, Earl of, see Keppel
Aldborough, 155
Aleppo, 11, 19
Alien Bills (English), 254
Allan, River, 261
Alleghany Mountains, 189
Allies, subsidies to, 91
Almanza, Battle of, 131
Almenara, 134
Alost, 129
Alps, the, 99, 104
Alsace, 124, 139, 176
America, regicides take refuge
in, 19 ; Dutch rivalry in, 28, 29 ;
' Queen Anne's War ' in, 120,
121 ; French and English
rivalry in, 157 ; situation in
(1754), 195 ; Braddock in, 195,
196 ; France sending troops to,
197 ; turn of tide in, 206, 207,
208 ; ' shall be coerced,' 287 ;
growth of the Thirteen Colonies,
289 ; Stamp Act imposed on,
290 ; disloyalty of, 290 291,
292 ; Pitt to conciliate, 293,
294 ; fresh agitation in, 295, 296,
297 ; summons first Congress,
298 ; rebellion of, 298, 299 ;
second Congress in, 299 ; war
begins in, 300 ; third Congress in,
300 ; Declaration of Independ-
ence of, 300, 301 ; many loyalists
in, 302 ; her chances of success,
3°3, 3°4 ', British plan of cam-
paign in, 305 ; France will help,
306, 307 ; Commercial Treaties
of, with France and England, 307
and note ; what France did for,
308, 310 ; campaigns of 1778,
1779, 1780, 1781 in, 309, 310 ;
cessation of war in, 311 ; the
Naval war off, 318 ; Inde-
pendence to be recognized, 319 ;
negotiations with, 320, 322 ;
Peace with, 322
— , British Colonies in North, 188,
189
— , French Colonies in North, 189,
190, 191
339
340
INDEX
America, Central, 104, 192
— , — , Scottish Colony projected
in, 250
— , South, 104
— , Spanish, 33 ; our first com-
mercial privileges in, 142, 143 ;
ceded to Philip V., 144; our
trade with, 158
Amherst, Jeffrey, Lord Amherst,
207, 208, 2ii, 214, 217, 218
Amnesty of 1660, 17, 18, 19
Amsterdam, ii, 53, 71
' Amsterdam,' ' New,' 28
Amulree, 266
' Anglicans,' see Church of Eng-
land
Anjou, Duke of, see Philip V. of
Spain
Anne, Queen, as Princess : taught
by Compton 63 ; friend of
Churchill, 67 ; her letters to
Mary, 68; her absence from birth
of Prince James, 70 ; deserts
James, 75 ; death of her chil-
dren, 80 ; Crown settled on, 81 ;
her unkindness to Mary, 82, 83 ;
her relation to the Churchills,
95 ; death of her son, 108 ;
courted by Prince George of
Hanover, 49, 50, 111
— , as Queen : 28 ; character of,
no, in ; forbids Opera, 113 ;
'Age of,' 114; Coronation of,
117 ; at Thanksgiving Service,
127 ; quarrels with Duchess
Sarah, 130, 135, 138 ; creates
Prince George a Peer, 131 ; her
husband dies, 134 ; managed by
Mrs. Hill, 135 ; rewards Sache-
verell, 138 ; interferes with Marl-
borough, 138 ; receives French
agents, 140 ; in Treaty of
Utrecht, 142, 143 ; succession to,
145, 146, 147 ; writes to Sophia,
145 ; illness of, 147 ; death of,
148 ; recommends Union, 252,
253 ; her successor in Scotland,
2 54. 255 I en d of her reign in
Scotland, 256 ; death of, 258,
259
' Annus Mirabilis ' (Dryden), 13
Anson, Admiral George, Lord
Anson, 177, 184, 199 (note),
200, 203, 204, 209, 220, 221,
222
' Antediluvians,' the, 247
Antigua, 192
Antwerp, ii, 128, 130, 144,
159
Appin, Stewarts of, 266
Appropriation Act, 89, 93
Aragon, 134
Argyll, Earl of, Duke of, see
Campbell
Arisaig, 266
Armed Neutrality (of 1780), 307
308, and note, 314
Army, of Cromwell, 16, 17 ; of
Charles II., 17 ; of James II.,
61 ; increased, 62 ; Catholics in,
62 ; at Hounslow, 69 ; discon-
tent in, 72 ; at Salisbury, 74, 75 ;
William III. takes command of,
77 ; declared ' against law,' 80,
94 ; denounced, 94, 106 ; in
Flanders, 100, 101, 102, 103 ;
cut down, 106 ; increased again,
107 ; of Marlborough, 121, 122,
123 ; neglect of, after 1714,
150 ; influence of George I. and
II. on, 154 ; a waxwork one,
165 ; at Carthagena, 177 ; in
Germany, 178 ; at Dettingen,
179 ; in Flanders, 181 ; at Fon-
tenoy, 182 ; at Cape Breton, 182 ;
in Scotland, 183 ; in America,
191 ; in Seven Years' War in
America, 195, 196, 197, 202, 207,
208 ; its budget, 206 ; in West-
phalia, 202, 204, 205, 209, 215,
216, 217 ; in America, 210-14,
217 ; in West Indies, 221 ; in
Portugal, size of, 219 and note ;
the English, in 1745, 263, 267,
268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275 ;
George III.'s interest in, 283 ;
jobbery in, 285 ; in American
War, sent out, 299 ; figures of,
301 ; chances of, 302 ; attacked
by traitors, 302 ; campaign, plan
of, 305 ; at Saratoga, 306 ; in
later years of war, 309, 310 ; at
Yorktown, 311 ; defending Gib-
raltar, 315, 316
Arnheim, 34
Arnold, Benedict, 300, 303, 305,
310
Arras, 138
Arschott, 129
Articles of War, 17 (note)
Artillery, separate branch of
Service, 123
— , Highlanders' fear of, 272,
275
INDEX
341
Arundell, Henry, Lord Arundell
of Wardour, 59
Ashley Cooper, Anthony, first
Earl of Shaftesbury, in ' Cabal,'
3 1 . 3 2 > 33 I goes into opposition,
35 ; creates Whig party, 36, 37,
38 ; founds Green Ribbon Club,
39 ; refuses bribe, 40 ; uses
Popish Plot, 43 ; becomes Presi-
dent of Council, 45 ; supports
Monmouth, 46 ; gets up plots,
47, 48 ; indicts James, 48, 49 ;
urges Bill of Exclusion, 49 ; at
Oxford, 50, 51 and note ; defeat
and death of, 53, 54 ; typical of
Opposition, 167
Ashmole, Elias, 14
' Asiento,' Treaty of, 143
Assize, ' The Bloody,' 61 and
note
Association, ' The Protestant '
(of 1688), 74
' Association,' the, of 1696, 95
Ath, 130
Atholl, Duke of, see Murray
Attainder, Act of, against
1 James III.,' 108
Atterbury, Francis, Bishop of
Rochester, 146
Auckland, Lord, see Eden
Audit (of 1668), 28
Auditor and Controller-Gen-
eral, Office of the, 89
Augsburg, 125
— , League of, 60
Augusta of Saxe Gotha, Prin-
cess of Wales, mother of George
III., 170, 225, 283
' Auld Reekie ' (Edinburgh), 270
Austria, gets Spanish Nether-
lands, 143 ; gets Naples, Milan
and Sardinia, 144 ; natural ally
of England, 158 ; discontent of,
159 ; at war with France j 159,
165, 172, 173 ; in grave danger,
175 ; France's attitude to, 176 ;
Prussia attacks, 176 ; attacked
in Italy, 177 ; England helps,
in Germany, 178 ; helps at
Dettingen, 180; in Flanders,
181, 182 ; seeking French alli-
ance, 194, 195 ; conspiring
against Prussia, 197; her French
Treaties, 198, 201, 204 ; beaten
by Frederick, 205 ; beats Fre-
derick, 208 ; defeats Frederick
at Kunersdorf, 215 ; defeated at
Liegnitz, 217 ; at Torgau, 217 ;
deserted by Russia, 221
Avignon, 262
Axminster, 74
Aylesbury 288
Baden, Grand Duchy of, 120
Bahamas, the, 192, 222
Balcarres, Lord, see Lindsay
Balearic Islands, 104
Balliol College, Oxford, 50
Balmerino, Lord, see Elphin-
stone
Baltic Sea, 314, 338
Bank of England, 92, 93 and
note, 95, 96, 249, 272, 329
Scotland, 249
Baptists, 65
Barbados, 192
Barbon (or Barebones), Nicholas,
10
Barcelona, 127
Barillon, Paul, Marquis de
Branges, 40, 54
Barra, Island of, 265
' Barrier Fortresses,' 106, 137,
143
— Treaty,' 143
Barrington, Admiral Samuel,
3i7
Barrow, Isaac, 15
Bart, Jean, 100
Bass Rock, the, 236
Bavaria, Electorate of, 104, 123,
125, 176, 178, 180, 183
— , Joseph, Electoral Prince of
(Baby), 104, 105
— , Maximilian Emmanuel, Elec-
tor of, 104, 123, 124, 125, 126,
127, 133
Baxter, Richard, 15
Beachy Head, Battle of, 98
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin
Caron de, 306
Beausejour, 197
Beattie, James, 279
Bedford, Earls of, Dukes of, see
Russell
Bedloe, William, 43, 47
Belasyse, Thomas, Lord Falcon-
bridge, 37
Belgium (see also Flanders), Oates
in, 41 ; Louis XIV. swallowing,
107 ; French and English rivalry
in, 158 ; detached from Spain,
1 5^> 159; in danger from France,
!94» !95> J 98 ; unprofitable to
342
INDEX
Austria, 194 ; France righting
England in, 264
Bellasys, John, Lord Bellasys, 59
Belleisle, 215, 219, 220, 224
Belleisle, Charles Louis Auguste
Fouquet, Due de, 210, 218
Bell Tavern, Westminster, 139
Ben Alder, 276
Benbow, Admiral John, 73, 98
Bennet, Henry, Earl of Arlington,
3*i 33
Ben Nevis, 245
Bentinck, William, 1st Earl of
Portland, 95
— , — Henry Cavendish, 3rd Duke
of Portland, 321
Bentley, Richard, 168
Berkeley, George, Bishop of
Cloyne, 150
Berlin, 180
Bernstorff, Andreas Gottlieb
von, 160
Berri, Charles, Duke of, 141
Bertie, James, 2nd Earl of Abing-
don, 64
Berwick, 268
Berwick, James, Duke of, Marshal
of France, 128, 131, 133, 146,
163, 258, 259
Bill of Rights, 79 80, 109
Biscay, Bay of, 314
' Bishop's Cheetham,' 155
Bishops, restoration of the, 1660,
22 and note ; advise James II.,
73
Bishops, the Scottish, 230, 232,
234, 236, 240, 241, 247 ; at
Revolution, 243 ; become Non-
Jurors, 243
• Bishops,' ' The Seven,' 68, 69, 70,
81
Black Sea, 338
' Black Watch,' 202 (note)
Blair Castle, 244, 274
Blair, Hugh, 279
Blake, Robert, 127, 193
Blakeney, William, afterwards
Lord Blakeney, 200
Blenheim, Battle of, 1 19, 121, 123,
124, 125, 126, 127
— , Palace of, 127
Blood, Thomas, 12
Bloomsbury, 112
1 Blues,' the, 17
Board of Trade, 290
Bodmin, 12
Bohemia, 175, 178, 181, 202, 204
Bombay, dowry of Queen Kathar-
ine, 9, 26
Bonn, 124
BonshaW, James Irving of, 235
Booth, Henry, 2nd Lord Dela-
mere, 1st Earl of Warrington,
61, 75
Boscawen, Admiral Edward, 184,
195, 207, 215
Boston (America), 191, 289, 290,
292, 295, 297, 299, 300, 301, 307
Bothmar, John Caspar, Count
von, 146, 160
BOTHWELL BRIGG, 237, 238
BOUCHAIN, I38
Boufflers, Louis Francois, Due
de, Marshal, 101, 123, 133
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de,
217
Bouille, Francois Claude Amour,
Marquis de, Marshal, 317
'Bounty,' 'Queen Anne's,' 111
Bourbon, the House of, 168, 173,
175; solidarity of, 219, 220;
again united, 307
— , Spanish Branch of House of,
192
Bourlamaque, Le Chevalier de,
211, 217
Boyd, William, 4th Earl of Kil-
marnock, 184, 269, 277
Brabant, Estates of , 130
— , Philip V. recognized as Duke
of, 118
Braddock, General Edward, 195,
196
Bradstreet, Colonel John, 208,
217, 302
Braemar, 260
Brandenburg, Frederick William,
Elector of, 71
Brandywine, River, 305
Brazil, 9, 104, 192
Breadalbane, Earl of, see Camp-
bell
Breda, 232
— , Declaration of, 18
Brest, 98, 103, 207, 209, 210
(note), 215, 216, 219, 221, 264,
306, 318 (note)
Bridgman, Sir Orlando, 31
Bridgwater, 61
Brihuega, 134
Bristol, trade of, 17th cent, 11,
307 (note), 333
' Britannia,' the, 72
Britannia, see Diva
INDEX
343
Brixham, 73
Broglie, Francois Marie, Due de,
Marshal, 178
Brown, John, 240
Browne, Sir Thomas, 115
Bruges, ii, 132, 133
Brussels, 45, 101, 123, 124, 129,
132, 133
Buchanan, George, 14
Buckingham, Duke of, see Villiers
Buckingham House, 284
Budget, origin of the, 89
' Buffs,' the, 40 (note)
' Bull,' ' John,' his habits, 259
Bunhii.l Fields, 13
Bunker's Hill, 300
Bunyan, John, 15, 25
BURFORD, 50
Burgoyne, Sir John, 299, 302,
305, 306
Burgundy, Louis, Duke of, 141
' Burke,' Betty, 276
Burke, Edmund, 137 (note), 156 ;
on George II. 's reign, 225 and
note; protege of Rockingham, on
Colonies, 294 ; leads Opposition,
296, 302 ; his oratory, 303, 312 ;
in office (1782), 319 ; on Sine-
cures, 320 ; cries for Economic
Reform, 323 ; a ' nominee,'
against Reform, 332 ; a bad
advocate, 333
Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salis-
bury, 52, 74
Burns, Robert, 249, 280
Busby, Dr. Richard, 65
' Bushell's Case,' 16
Bute, County of, 332
— , Earl of, see Stuart
Butler, James, 12th Earl of, 1st
Duke of Ormond, 12, 25, 72
— , — , 2nd Duke of Ormond, 139,
141, 145, 258, 259
— , Joseph, Bishop of Durham, 150
— , Samuel, 13
Byng, Admiral George, Viscount
Torrington, 163, 256
— , Admiral John, 200
' Cabal,' the, 31, 32, see also
Cabinet
Cabinet, origin of the, 25, 31 ;
James II. 's first, 58 ; growth of
the, 1714, 153, 154 ; Walpole's
• mastery of the, 164, 170;
intrigues against Walpole, 174 ;
recklessness of elder Pitt in
the, 219 ; Pitt's strength and
weakness in, 327 ; does not
always share Pitt's views, 335,
338
Cadiz, 84, 127, 220
Cadogan, William, afterwards 1st
Earl Cadogan, 119, 122, 261
Cadzant, 33
Calais, 114
Calendar, The New, 185 and note
Calvinism (in Scotland), 228, 279
Cambrai, 138
Cambridge, 326
— , University of, 64, 65
Cambridge, Duke of, title of
Prince George, afterwards
George II., 145
Camden, 309
Camden, Earl, see Pratt
Cameron, family of, 231, 260, 266,
268
— of Lochiel, Donald, 266, 268,
275
— , Richard, 234, 238
' Cameronians,' 238, 240, 249 ;
regiment of, 244, 248
Campbell, Archibald, 8th Earl of
Argyll, 229, 234, 239, 246
— , — 9th Earl of Argyll, 54, 60,
239, 241
— , John, 2nd Duke of Argyll, and
Duke of Greenwich, 136, 147,
253, 257, 259, 260, 261
— , — , 1st Earl of Breadalbane,
245
— , — , 4th Earl of Loudoun, 206,
274
— , family of, 231, 239, 241, 274
(note), 275 (note)
Canada (French), 189 ; slow
growth of, 190 ; outworks of,
191 ; La Galissoniere in, 193,
194 ; reinforcements sent to,
195. I 97 ', on the defensive, 207,
208
— , Pitt plans conquest of, 210 ;
campaign of 1759 in, 211, 212,
213, 214 ; final conquest of, 217,
218 ; ceded to Britain, 224 ;
Scottish emigration to, 281 ;
Americans urge to revolt, 298 ;
open to Colonists, 289 ; boun-
daries of, in dispute, 297 and
note ; Americans repulsed from,
300 ; our base of attack, 305
Canning, George, against Reform,
a ' nominee,' 332
344
INDEX
CanoncxAte, 255
Canvassing, denounced (1722),
162
Cape Breton, 185, 189, 191, 193
Cape Horn, 192, 296
Cape St. ViNCENT.Rodney's battle
off, 315
Capel, Arthur, Earl of Essex,
37. 45. 53. 54
Cap Rouge, 211, 212, 213
Carfax, Oxford, 50
Cargill, Donald, 234, 235
Carleton, Guy, 1st Lord Dor-
chester, 300
Carlisle, 271, 273, 277
Carlisle, Earl of, see Howard
Carlyle, Alexander, 279
Carolina, North and South, 188,
3°9
Caroline, Queen of George II.,
150, 153, 163, 166, 167, 169, 170,
172
Carpenter, General George, Lord
Carpenter, 261
Carron, 280
Carronades, 280
Carstairs, William, 240, 246, 253
Carteret, John, Lord Carteret,
afterwards Earl Granville, 151,
154 ; refuses to cede Gibraltar,
163 ; his hands clean, 163 ; in
Ireland, 164 ; his character and
policy, 167, 168, 169 ; George
II. consults, 170; takes office
(1742), 177 ; his German policy,
178, 180 ; fall of, 181 ; his real
aims, 182 ; his last attempt at
a Ministry, 183 ; becomes Pre-
sident of Council, 185 ; 199,
201, 203, 204, 219, 220, 224
Carthagena, 207
— (Nueva), 177,
Cassel, 223
Castile, 127
Castlemaine, Earl of, see Palmer
— , Lady, 30
Castlereagh, Viscount ; see Ste-
wart
Catalans, 143
Catalonia, 127, 134, 139, 143
Catholics, under Charles II., 33
sqq. ; under James II., 57, 59,
62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 75 ; first
Relief Bill for, 297, 312 ; second
Relief Bill for, 337
— , the Irish, justice denied to, 287
— , the Scottish, 228, 240, 241
Cavalry, Marlborough's use of,
122, 123
Cavendish, William, 4th Earl, 1st
Duke of Devonshire, 62, 70, 83
— , — , 4th Duke of Devonshire,
200, 202
— , family of, 286
Cecil, James, 3rd Earl of Salis-
bury, 37
Champlain, Lake (see also ' Little
Lakes '), 211
Chancellor of Exchequer,
office of, 89
Charlotte, Queen of George III.,
28 4» 33 6 »
Charleroi, 102, 130
Charles I., 57, 235, 248
Charles II., character of, 4, 5 ;
his attitude to France and
Holland, 6 ; re-enacts Naviga-
tion Acts, 12 ; feeds ducks, 13 ;
rewards Ken, 15 ; issues Articles
of War, 17 (note) ; revenue of,
20, 21 ; inclined to toleration,
22, 24 ; attitude to Dutch War,
1665, 28 and note ; concludes
peace, 1667, 30 ; throws over
Clarendon, 30 ; gets money from
France, 32 ; suspends interest on
Debt, 32 ; concludes Treaty of
Dover, 32 ; deceives Louis XIV.,
34» 39 \ issues Declaration of
Indulgence, 35 ; political skill
of, 38, 44, 52 ; marries Mary to
William, 39 ; his relations with
Louis XIV., 40, 41, 55 ; warned
against Jesuits, 42, 43 ; dissolves
Parliament, 44 ; turns to the
Opposition, 45 ; his offers to
Parliament, 46 ; refuses to recog-
nize Monmouth as heir, 46, 47,
49, 51 ; sacrifices Catholics, 47,
48 ; calls Parliament at Oxford,
49 ; dissolves it, 51 ; foresight of,
52 ; prosecutes Whigs, 53 ; plot
against, 54 ; last years and death
of, 55 ; Members of his Parlia-
ments recalled, 77 ; the ' bud-
gets ' of, 89 ; his Restoration in
Scotland, 227 ; listens to Lauder-
dale, 228 ; Scottish loyalty, to,
231 ; his toleration, 233 ; ex-
communicated by fanatics, 238 ;
238 ; would have pardoned
Argyll, 239 ; his scheme for a
Union, 248
Charles, Archduke of Austria,
INDEX
345
called ' Charles III. of Spain,'
105, 118, 120, 127, 128, 130, 131,
141 ; becomes Charles VI., Em-
peror (q.v.), 141
Charles II., King of Spain, 33,
40, 98, 105
Charles III., King of Spain, 218,
219
Charles V., Emperor, 141
Charles VI., Emperor, his dis-
content after Utrecht, 158, 159;
death of, 175, 176
Charles VII., Emperor, 176 and
note ; death of, 183
Charles XII., King of Sweden,
258, 262, 263
Charles Edward, Prince, 180 ;
early years of, 263, 264 ; starts
North from Rome, embarks at
Dunkirk, 264 ; starts from
Nantes, lands in Western Isles,
265 ; raises Royal Standard,
266 ; pushes on South, 267 ;
enters Edinburgh, wins Preston-
pans, 268 ; at Holyrood, 269 ;
his difficulties, 270 ; starts for
England, 271 ; at Derby, 272 ;
retreat of, 273 ; wins Falkirk,
retreats to Highlands, 274 ; at
Culloden, 275 ; his wanderings,
276 ; his old age, 277
Charleston, 309
Charlotte, Queen of George III.,
284
Chatham, 30, 67
Chatham, Earl of, see Pitt
Cheapside, 161
Cherbourg, 209
Chesapeake Bay, 318
Cheshire, 61, 75 78
Child, Sir Josiah, 10
China, 190 r
Choiseul, Etienne Francois, Due
de, 210, 216, 219, 223, 226, 292,
295, 296, 313
Christ Church, Oxford, 50, 64
Christian V., King of Denmark,
98
Christie, William Dougal, Au-
thor of ' Life of Lord Shaftes-
bury,' 51 (note)
Churchill, John, Duke of Marl-
borough, at Sedgemoor, 61 ;
friend of Anne, 67, 1 1 1 ; dis-
loyalty of, 72; deserts James, 75;
educates Duke of Gloucester, 81 ;
Mary distrusts, 83 ; William paves
way for, 66 ; his possible treason,
96, 99, 1 03 and note ; in Tower, 99 ;
' Vindication of,' 116 ; character
of, 117, 118 ; love for his soldiers,
118; supported by Eugene,
118 ; Allies' jealousy of, 119,
120 ; ' makes armies,' 120 ;
serenity of, 122 ; his campaigns
of 1702, 1703, 123 ; his campaign
of Blenheim, 124, 125, 126 ;
builds Blenheim Palace, 127 ;
forces Villeroy's lines, 1705, 128 ;
his campaign of 1705, 1706, 129,
130 ; watching events in Medi-
terranean, 130 ; waiting at
Lou vain, 131 ; his campaign of
1708, 132, 133 ; his power
slipping away, 134, 135, 138 ;
goes to Hague, 135 ; his cam-
paign of 1709, 135, 136 ; protests
against Sacheverell's impeach-
ment, 137 ; Queen interferes
with him, 138 ; deceived by
Ministers, 140 ; at the Hague
(1711), 141 ; dismissed, 141 ;
end of, 142; his lessons forgotten,
150 ; Carteret inherits policy of,
167; hangs contractors, 178; his
teaching of musketry, 179 ;
effect on Scotland of his
victories, 254 ; his successor,
259
Church of England, restoration
of, 4, 7, 21, 22, 23 ; intolerance
of, 23, 24 ; in danger under
James II., 56, 57, 59 ; loyalty of,
59, 60 ; its loyalty strained, 63,
64, 65 ; popular, 69, 71 ; will
make concessions, 71 ; James
makes concessions to, 73 ;
under William III., 83, 87 ;
under Queen Anne, m, 112 ;
fever of, 119; 'in danger'
(1706), 131, 135, 138 ; power of,
140 ; intolerance of, 131, 140 ;
hesitating on Succession ques-
tion, 146 ; change in, after 1714,
149, 150 ; political jobbery in,
285
Church of Scotland, the Episco-
pal, restoration of, 228, 229,
230 ; character of, 230 ; in bad
hands, 231, 232 ; ministers re-
fuse conformity to, 232, 236 ; at
the Revolution, becomes Non-
Juror, 243 ; Scotland would have
preferred, 244 ; its ministers
346
INDEX
' outed,' 247 ;" no toleration
for, 252, 253 ; toleration for,
256 ; fierce Act against, 262 ;
proscribed after 1745, 278
Cibber, Colley, 153
'City,' the (influence of London),
157, 170, 174 ; providing for
Army, 271 (note) ; hostile to
North, 296
Civil List (of William III.), 88 ;
of George II., 167 ; of George
III., 285
Civil Service, jobbery in, 285
' Claim of Right,' 243
Clarendon, Earls of, see Hyde.
Claverhouse, see Graham
Cleland, Colonel William, 244
Clementina, Queen of James III.,
263
Clifford, Sir Thomas, 1st Lord
Clifford of Chudleigh, 31, 32, 33
35
Clifton, skirmish of, 273
Clinton, Sir Henry, 299, 302, 309,
310, 311
Clive, Robert, Lord Clive, 209
Clue, Admiral de la, 215
Clyde, River, 241, 280
Coaches, 'flying,' 12, 114
Coalition, Ministry of the, 321,
323, 324, 325, 336
Cobham, family of Lord, 169,
183
Coblentz, 124
' Cock o' the North,' 266
Coinage, renewed in William III.'s
reign, 90 ; fluctuation of, 93
and note, 96
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, Marquis
de Seignelay, 189
Coldstream Guards, 17
Coleman, Edward, 41
Collieries, 114
Colonies (see also America), Com-
mittee for the, 8 ; restrictions
on trade of, 171, 188, 189
— , ' The Thirteen,' 189
— , Glasgow trade with the, 256
— (our North American), growth
of the Thirteen, 289
— , Secretary of State for the, 290
and note
Commission, The Ecclesiastical,
63, 64, 72 ; declared illegal, 79
Commissioners for Union (Scot-
tish), 254
Common Law, restoration of Rule
of, 3 ; Hale's contributions to,
15 ; on liability of soldiers, 94;
291, 300, 301
Companies, Joint Stock, 9, 10
Comprehension Bill, failure of, 87
Compton, Edward, Bishop of
London, 62, 63, 70, 73, 111
— , Sir Spencer, 1st Lord Wilming-
ton, 166, 167, 177
'Conduct of Allies,' the, 116,
215
Congress, the first American,
298 ; the Second, 299 ; the Third,
300, 303, 305, 306, 311, 322
Congreve, William, 96
Conflans, Hubert de Brienne,
Comte de, 215, 216
Coote, Sir Eyre, 217
Constantinople, 338
Constitution, Burke defends the,
333
Conti, Francois Louis, Prince de,
102
' Contract,' ' The Original,' 79
Conventicle Act, 24, 25
Conventicles, the Scottish, 235,
236, 237, 241
Convention of 1660, 16, 21
— of 1689, 77, 78, 79 ; becomes a
Parliament, 79, 80 ; 301
— , the Scottish (of 1689), 242, 243
— of 1739 (El Pardo), 173
' Conventions of the Constitu-
tion,' 324 and note, 325
Convocation, 112
Conway, Henry Seymour, Mar-
shal, 293, 319
Cook, Captain James, 100, 211
Cope, Sir John, 267, 268
Corn, price of (Anne's reign), 112
— Law of 1689, 8
Cornwallis, Admiral Sir William,
318 (note)
— , Charles, 1st Marquis Corn-
wallis, 302, 309, 310, 311, 318
' Corporate,' ' Christopher,' 331
Corporation Act, 1661, 23
Corporations, the Municipal, to
be remodelled, 66; to be
restored, 72
CORRYARRICK, PaSS Of, 267
Corsica, 295
Corunna, 114
Cosin, Bishop John, 22
' Country Party,' the, 36
Court Almanac, the, 168
Courts of Regality, 277
INDEX
347
COURTENAY, John, 303
' Covenant,' the Scottish, of 1638,
228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 237, 239,
247, 248, 279
Covenanters, the Scottish, 47,
229, 230 ; refuse conformity,
232, 236 ; ' Martyrs,' 233, 240 ;
insurrections of, 233, 234, 236,
237, 238, 239, 240
Covent Garden, 13
Coventry, Henry, Secretary of
State, 38
— , Sir William, 36
' Coventry Island,' 155
Cowpens, 309
' Craftsman,' ' The,' 167
Crail, 232
Cranborne, 51 (note)
Craufurd, John Walkinshaw,
219
Crefeld, 209, 214
Crewe, Nathaniel, 3rd Lord Crewe,
Bishop of Durham, 63
Crewkerne, 74
Cricket, 113
Crime, absence of, in Scotland,
279, 280
Crofts, James, Duke of Mon-
mouth, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54,
55 ; insurrection of, 60, 61
and note, 62, 237, 241
Cromwell, Oliver, his Army re-
membered, 94
Crown Lands, 19, 21
Crownpoint, 211
Cuba, 192, 221, 222
Culloden, Battle of, 184, 273,
274. 275
Cumberland, Duke of, see Wil-
liam
Currency, the Scottish, 251 and
note
Customs Consolidation Act, 329
Cutts, John, Lord Cutts, 101, 102,
126
'Daily Courant,' 114
Dalrymple, Sir James, 1st Vis-
count Stair, 239, 245
— , Sir John, 1st Earl of Stair, 242,
245. 246
— , John, 2nd Earl of Stair, 178
259
— , family of, 231, 239, 245
Dalyell, Thomas, 235, 236
Dampier, William, 100
Danby, Earl of, see Osborne
Dangerfield, Thomas, 43
Danube, River, 124, 125, 178
Darby, Admiral George, 316
Darien, 249, 250, 254
Dartmouth, Earl of, see Legge
Dauphin, see Louis, Dauphin
Deane, Private (of the Guards),
his journal, 121, 132, 133
— , Silas, 306
— , Sir Anthony, 29
' Deans,' ' Jeanie,' 166, 253
Declaration of Indulgence (of
1687), 65, 66 ; (of 1688), 68, 69
Declarations of Indulgence,
the Scottish, 230, 232, 233, 236,
241
Declaration of Right, 79
Declaration of William of
Orange, 73
' Declaratory Act,' 293
Defoe, Daniel, on Charles II., 5
(note); 115, 116, 153
Deists, the, 150
Delamere, Lord, see Booth
Delaware, 188
— River, 310
Demosthenes, 168, 181
Denain, Battle of, 142
Dendermond, 130
Denmark, joins Grand Alliance, 98
Deptford, 12
Derby, 184, 272, 274
Derbyshire, 75
Derwentwater, Earl of, see
Radcliffe
Dettingen, Battle of, 179, 180,
182, 196, 315
Devonshire, 25, 61
Devonshire, Earl of, Duke of,
see Cavendish
Dicey, Professor A. V., 312 (note)
Dispensing Power, the, 24, 62,
63 ; declared illegal, 80
Dissenters, position of, 1660, 22,
23, 24, 25 ; refuse to be cajoled,
35 ; James' offers to the, 65 ;
to be caressed, 66 ; the Church
will conciliate, 7 1 ; under Tolera-
tion Act, 87 ; Churchmen hate,
112 ; position of, under Anne,
I 3 I » x 35» I 37» I 4°» J 46 ; riches
of, 147 ; propose to exterminate
Red Indians, 190 ; Relief Bill
(1779), 297
' Diva Britannia,' 3, 156
' Dogs,' Parable of the, 158, 159
Dominica, 192, 219, 317, 318, 321
348
INDEX
donauworth, 125
doncaster, 272
Dorking, 225
Dorsetshire, 60, 61
Douay, 135, 138
Douglas, James, 2nd Duke of
Queensberry, 242, 253, 255
, 4th Duke of Hamilton,
253
— , William, 3rd Duke of Hamil-
ton, 242
Dover, Secret Treaty of, 32,
35
Dover, Lord, see Jermyn
Downs, the, Dartmouth's fleet in,
74
Dragoons, the English, at Pres-
tonpans, 268 ; at Falkirk, 274
Drake, Francis, 173, 193
Dresden, 201
Drummond, James, Earl of Perth,
240, 242
— , — , 2nd (titular) Duke of
Perth, 267, 269, 275
— , family of, 273
Drury Lane Theatre, 112
Dryden, John, 13, 53, 58, 114,
115
Duff, Captain Robert, 215, 216
Dugdale, Sir William, 14
Dumfries, 236
Dunbar, 268
Dunblane, 267
Dundas of Arniston, Henry,
afterwards Lord Melville, 320 ;
his style of speaking, 327 ; draws
the India Bill, 330 ; supports
Reform, 335
Dundee, Viscount, see Graham
Dungeness, 264
DUNKELD, 244
Dunkirk, 17, 26, 31, 143, 224,
256, 264, 265, 321
Dunning, John, afterwards 1st
Lord Ashburton, 312, 319
Duquesne, Le Marquis Duquesne
de Meneval, Governor of Canada,
193
Duras, Louis, Earl of Feversham,
61, 72
Dutch {see also Holland), troops
with William III., 74 ; Guards
dismissed, 106 ; in British
Colonies, 189
Dykvelt, Everard van Weede
van, 66
Dyle, River, 129
East India Company, the, 9 ;
hostile to North, 296 ; sends Tea
to America, 297
(Scottish), 249, 254
East Indies, French and English
rivalry in, 158 ; in Seven Years'
War, 217; Scottish Trade with,
280 ; France late in attacking
(1781), 308 ; British fleet sent to
(1781), North's troubles in, 311 ;
Rockingham's troubles in, 319,
320; the War of 1781-3 in, 313
' Eatanswill," 155, 156
Ebro, River, 131
Economic Reform, Whigs cry
for, 311, 320 ; Whigs shirk, 323 ;
Pitt carries through, 328, 329
Eddystone Lighthouse, 124
Eden, William, 1st Lord Auck-
land, 330
Edinburgh, Advocates' Library
in, 234 ; threatened by insur-
gents, 237 ; James well received
in, 238, 240 ; executions at, 240 ;
sympathy for Renwick in, 241 ;
Convention meets at, 242 ;
William and Mary proclaimed
at, 243 ; Highlanders come to,
253 ; fierceness of mob of, 254,
255 ; Union unpopular in, 256 ;
Argyll defends, 260 ; Charles
Edward at, 268, 269, 270 ;
Whigs rcoccupy, 273 ; peaceable
state of, 280
Education, Scottish, 248, 279
Edward L, 87
Edward III., 198
Edward VII. , 88, 338
Egremont, Earl of, see Wynd-
r ham
Eguilles, Alexandre Jean Bap-
tiste de Boyer, Marquis d', 269
Elcho, Lord, see Wemyss
Eliot, Sir John, 31, 35, 36
Eliott of Stobs, George, 1st
Lord Heathfield, 315, 316
Elizabeth, Czarina of Russia, 221
— , Queen, Accession Day of, 48 ;
Germans on her throne, 108
— , ' Queen of Bohemia,' 108
— (Farnese), Queen of Spain,
173
Elphinstone, Arthur, 6th Lord
Balmerino, 184, 269, 277
Emden, 206
Ems, River, 206
Engineers, at Blenheim, 123
INDEX
349
Episcopacy (Scottish), see Church
of Scotland
Equity, Systematized, 15
Erastianism, 230, 236, 243, 244
Eriska, Island of, 265
Ernest Augustus, Elector of
Hanover, 99
Erskine, Dr. John, 279
— , John, 6th Earl of Mar, 145,
260, 261, 262
— , Thomas, afterwards Lord Ers-
kine, 335
Esk, River, 273
Essex, Earl of, see Capel
Estaing, Charles Hector, Comte
d\ ^309, 3M. 3i6, 317
Estrees, Jean d', Admiral, 34
Etherege, Sir George, 13
Eugene, Francis, Prince of Savoy -
Carignan, his hatred of Louis
XIV., 119, 120 ; Hanover
jealous of, 120 ; in Italy, 120 ;
on our Cavalry, 122 ; consults
with Marlborough, 124 ; at
Stollhofen, 125 ; at Blenheim,
126 ; in Italy, 130 ; at Malpla-
quet, 136 ; visits England, 141 ;
beaten at Denain, 142
' Europa,' ' Dame,' 159
Evelyn, John, 14
1 Examiner,' the, 139
Excise, 20 ; Walpole's scheme of,
171, 172 ; English law of, Scot-
land resists, 264 ; Pitt carries
motion for, 329
Exclusion Bill, the, 46, 49, 51,
58. 67, 238
Exe, River, 74
Exeter, 74
Fairfax, Thomas, 5th Lord Fair-
fax, 114
' Fairservice,' ' Andrew,' 255
Falconbridge, Lord, see Belasyse
Falkirk, Battle of, 183, 273, 274
Falkland Isles, 296
' Family Compacts,' 173, 193, 220
Ferdinand, Prince of Brunswick,
208, 209, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219
(note), 221, 223, 225
Ferdinand VI., King of Spain,
218
Ferguson, Robert, 54
Feversham, 76
Feversham, Earl of, see Duras
Fielding, Henry, 153
Fife, 260
' Fifteen,' The (Insurrection of
1715), 258, 259, 260, 261, 262,
263, 267
Finch, Daniel, 2nd Earl of Not-
tingham, 67, 70, 75, 78, 96, 119
— , Sir Heneage, 1st Earl of
Nottingham, 15
Fitzroy, Augustus Henry, 3rd
Duke of Grafton, 293, 295, 296,
319
' Five Mile Act,' 1665, 24
Flanders, aggression of Louis
XIV. on, 39 ; William goes to,
97 ; army going to, 99 ; cam-
paign in, 100-3 I character of,
100, 101 ; Louis dominates,
106 ; Barrier fortresses in, 106 ;
Philip V. recognized as Count of,
118; campaigns in, 120, 121,
123, 124, 128 ; nearly clear of
French, 1706, 130; in danger
again, 1707, 131 ; ceded to
Austria, 143 ; her commerce
ruined, 144 ; English troops to
(1743), 178 ; Marshal Saxe in,
181 ; campaign of 1745 in, 182,
184 ; William III. fighting in,
245, 250 ; Louis XIV.'s wars in,
264 ; troops brought from, 269
— (French), English troops in,
x 30> 133. 135, 136
Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun,
253. 254
Fleury, Andre Hercule, Cardinal
de, 158, 165, 173, 176
Flint, Captain, 193
Florence, Charles Edward at,
277
Florida, 189, 224, 315, 321
— , Gulf of, 192,
Fontenoy, Battle of, 182, 265
Forbes, Alexander, 4th Lord
Pitsligo, 269, 302
— , Brigadier John, 208
Foreland, the North, 29
Forster, Thomas, 260, 261
Fort Augustus, 266, 267, 274
— Duquesne, 194, 196, 207, 208
— Frontenac, 197, 208
— St. Philip, 200
— William, 245, 246, 274
— William Henry, 206
Fortescue, J. W., ' History of
British Army,' 85, 205,-218
Forth, River, 260, 267, 274, 280
' Forty-five,' The (Insurrection
of 1745), 266-77
350
INDEX
Fox, Charles James, on Lord
North's speeches, 296 ; spouting
treason, 303, 308 ; in office, 319,
320 ; resigns, 320 ; in the Coali-
tion, 321 ; neglects economic
reform, 323 ; dismissed, 324 ;
his followers defeated, 325 ;
King's hatred for, 327 ; de-
nounces Commercial Treaty, 329
(note), trying to 'pull down the
House,' 335 ; corrupts Prince of
Wales, 336 ; at Regency Crisis,
336, 337 ; intrigues with Russia,
338 (note)
— , Henry, afterwards 1st Lord
Holland, 194, 200, 204, 223, 286,
303
' Foxhall,' see Vauxhall
France, trade rivalry with, 11 ;
joins Dutch (1666), 29, 30 ;
Clarendon's exile in, 31 ;
Charles II. allied with, 32 ;
joins England against Dutch
(1672), 33, 34 ; not allied with
England, 1688, 68 ; dread of,
78 ; William's Coalition against,
86, 98, 107 ; tariff against, 90 ;
war with, 97 ; fleets of, 98 ;
gallantry of, 99 ; prepares in-
vasion, 99 ; her armies in
Flanders, 101, 102, 103 ; peace
(1697) with, 103 ; exhausted,
103 ; never to be united with
Spain, 105 ; rejection of Com-
mercial Treaty with, 144, 145 ;
British rivalry with (eighteenth
century), 157 ; temporary al-
liance with, 158 ; a ' dogmaster '
I 5^> 159, 160 ; her war with
Austria (1733) 159 ; Stanhope's
Treaty with, 161 ; her little war
with Spain, 163 ; Fleury's weak
government of, 165 ; her war
with Austria (1733), 165, 172 ;
Carteret's hostility to, 168 ;
certain to aid Spain, 173 ; her
attitude to Austria, 176 ; con-
cludes Treaty with Prussia, 176 ;
attacks Austria (1741), 177 ; not
' at war ' with England, 178 ;
beaten at Dettingen, 179 ; fights
England off Toulon, 180 ; pro-
jects invasion, 181 ; her hands
to be. tied, 182 ; takes Madras,
loses Louisburg, 182 ; beaten at
sea, 184 ; concludes Peace of
Aix, 185; her American Colonies,
189, 190, 191 ; intelligent in
colonizing, 193 ; jealous of Spain,
193 ; Austria approaching, 194,
195 ; involved on the Continent,
197, 201 ; makes Treaty with
Austria (1756), 198 ; takes
Minorca, 200 ; sends army over
Rhine, 201 ; makes second
Treaty with Austria (1757), 204;
Pitt's strategy against, 205 ;
defending Canada, 207 208 ;
her coasts harried, 209 ; her
privateers, 209 ; her Navy, her
designs on Neutrals, 210 ; her
plans of invasion, 214, 215 ;
beaten at sea, 215, 216 ; her loss
of Canada, 218 ; her alliance
with Spain, 219, 220 ; her
designs in 1761, 221 ; concludes
Peace of Paris, 224 ; her gallant
Navy, 225, 226 ; Scotland cut
off from, 227, 228 ; the Alliance
of Scotland with her is not dead,
252 ; helps Jacobites, 256 ; not
unfavourable to James III.,
258 ; supplies expected from,
260 ; allied with England, 262 ;
will help Charles Edward, 264 ;
her aid necessary, 266 ; sends
an agent, 269 ; will not risk
troops, 270 ; last war with ' Old,'
287 ; first war with ' New,' 287 ;
her Treaty with America, 291,
306 ; watching England, 292,
294 ; watching events, 292, 295,
304, 306 ; Chatham's schemes
against, 293, 304 ; Chatham's
hostility to, 294, 304, 308;
favours America, 306; concludes
Treaty with America, 307 and
note ; stirs up Coalition, 307 ; her
Navy during the war, 308, 309,
310, 311, 313, 314, 315, 316,
317, 318, 319; negotiations for
peace with, 320 ; peace with,
321 ; Pitt's Commercial Treaty
with, 329 and note, 337 ; inter-
course with, 337, 338 ; will not
support Spain in Vancouver,
338
Franchise, 334 and note
Francis I., Emperor (see also
Lorraine, Francis Stephen, Duke
of), 183
Francis Stephen, Duke of
Lorraine, afterwards Emperor
Francis I., 175
INDEX
35i
Franklin, Benjamin, 291, 292,
306, 320, 322
Fraser, Clan of, 260, 269, 273
Fraser, Simon, Lord Lovat, 260,
270, 273, 277
' Fraser's Regiment,' 202 (note)
Frederick I., King of Prussia, 98
Frederick the Great, King of.
Prussia, 167 ; not a gentleman,
seizes Silesia, 176 ; concludes
peace (1742), 177 ; ' the wicked
man,' 180 ; seizes Bohemia, 181 ;
makes peace (1745), 182, 183 ;
Russia will attack, 194 ; guar-
antees Hanover, 197 ; concludes
Convention of Westminster,
197, 198; Pitt relies on, 201,202;
his victories in Seven Years'
War, 204, 205, 208 ; subsidized
by England, 206 ; Newcastle
wishes to desert, 209 ; beaten
at Kunersdorf, 215 ; Pitt clings
to, 216, 217 ; wins Liegnitz, 217 ;
in danger again, 221 ; Bute
wishes to desert, 223 ; at end
of war, 223 ; refuses alliance,
294
Frederick, Prince of Wales,
169, 170, 186
Free Trade, Pitt's measures
towards, 329, 330
French Revolution, 92 ; its
poison, 157; 249, 284 (note),
287, 326 ; its effect on reforming
measures, 330 (note), 335
Frew, fords of, 267
Frontenac, Louis de Buade,
Comte de, 189, 190
' Funds,' rise and fall of the, 92,
106, 329
Gaelic language, 265
Gage, General Thomas, 299
Galloway, 233, 235, 237, 238,
242, 260
Galway, Earl of, see Ruvigny
' Gandercleuch,' 281
Gates, General Horatio, 303, 305,
309
Gatton, 331
George I., as Electoral Prince:
49, 50, in ; as Elector of
Hanover, in Marlborough's wars,
120; Occasional Conformity Act
repealed, 131, 140 ; becomes
Parliamentary heir, 145 ; his
preparations for succession, 146,
148 ; as King, character of, 151,
152 ; sides with France against
Spain, 141, 163 ; does not trust
Marlborough, 142, 259 ; wants
to fight Russia, 162 ; his
mistresses gamble, 163 ; and
job commissions, 165 ; death
of, 166 ; not in a hurry, 258 ;
sends troops to Oxford, 259 ;
Lovat declares for, 260
George II., as Electoral Prince :
created a Peer, 131 ; at Ouden-
arde, 133 ; to be sent for, 145 ;
as Prince of Wales : character of,
1 5 2 > J 53> love for Hanover, 160;
gambling in South Sea Stock,
163 ; wants to support Austria,
165; as King, 166; Walpole con-
ciliates, 167; hates his son, 169;
dying to go to war, 172; goes
to Hanover, 174; wishes to sup-
port Maria Theresa, 176 ; hates
Frederick the Geat, 176 ; in a
fever, 177 ; leads his army,
178 ; wins Dettingen, 179, 180 ;
unpopularity of, 180 ; yields to
Pelham, 181 ; not so foolish as
Pelham, 182 ; indifference of
nation to, 183 ; hates Pitt, 194,
201 ; hated by Frederick of
Prussia, 197 ; clings to idea of
neutrality for Hanover, 202 ;
muzzled, likes his muzzle, 203 ;
authorizes a Convention, dis-
avows it, 205 ; keen to take
Canada, 210 ; on Wolfe, 214 ;
death of, 218 ; Wade reports to,
263 ; calls the ' Forty-five ' ' an
unnatural rebellion,' 267 ; in-
difference of England to, 271,
273 ; offers bounty for recruits,
packs portmanteau, 272 ; Edin-
burgh held for, 273 ; Whig Clans
raised for, 274 ; buys Hessians,
275 ; arbitrary man, 278
George III., debts of, 88; 222,
225 ; Highlanders serve, 281 ;
character of, 282, 283, 284 ;
aims of, 284, 285 ; his dogged
efforts, 286 ; agreed with his
people, 287 ; George Grenville
and, 288 ; against Wilkes, 288 ;
gets rid of George Grenville, 292;
turns to Whigs, then to Pitt,
293 ," gets hold of Townshend,
295 ; relies on ' King's Friends'
and North, 296 ; America re-
352
INDEX
nounces, 301 ; Whigs mistrust,
301, 302 ; keeps North against
his will, 311 ; jobs House of
Commons, 312 ; saves London,
312 ; distrusts Shelburne, 320 ;
is ready to cede Gibraltar, 321 ;
accepts Coalition, 321 ; his
health proposed, 322 ; begins to
be popular, 323 ; makes over-
tures to Pitt, 323 ; dismisses
Coalition, 324 ; violates con-
ventions, 324 ; continues to job,
327 ; his letters to Pitt, 327,
328 ; buys boroughs, 332 ; goes
mad, 335 ; his insanity, 336 ;
gets well, 337
George, Prince of Denmark, 50,
"I. 134
George, Prince of Wales, after-
wards George IV., proposed as
Regent, 336, 337
Georgia, 189, 191, 309
Geete, River, 128, 129
Genappe, 129
General Warrants, 288
Germaine, Lord George (see also
Sackville, Lord George), 299,
305, 309
Germans, immigrants, 114 ; in
British Colonies, 189
Germany, Princes of North, side
with William III., 71 ; scheme for
union of, 177, 178, 180 ; bravery
of her troops, 182 ; ' John Bull '
hires troops from, 259, 274,
275
Gertruydenberg, 138
Ghent, 129, 132, 133
Gibraltar, taken, 121, 127 ; ceded
to England, 143; 158, 159, 163,
200, 205, 301, 313, 314, 315, 316,
320, 321
Gifford, Bonaventure, 64
' Gillespie Grumach,' see Camp-
bell, Archibald, 8th Earl of
Argyll
Gladstone, William Ewart, 89,
305 ; a ' nominee,' on merit of
unreformed Parliament, 332
Glasgow, 236 ; insurgents take,
237 ; Union unpopular in, 256 ;
Charles Edward at, 273 ; poor
rate in, 280 ; riches of, 280
Glencoe, 239, 245, 246
Glenfinnan, 266
Glengarry, Macdonald of, 245
Glenkens, the, 236
Glenlyon, Campbell of, 246
Glenshiel, Battle of, 263
Gloucester, Duke of, see William
Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry, 42,
43
Godolphin, Sidney, Lord Godol-
phin, 47, 55, 58, 75, 96, 119, 137,
139
Goldsmiths, the London, 32
Gordon, Clan of, 273
— , George, 4th Marquis of Hunt-
ley, 1st Duke of Gordon, 242,
312 and note
— , John, 8th (titular) Viscount
Kenmure, 269
— , Lord Lewis, 269
— , William, 6th Viscount Ken-
mure, 260, 262
Goree, 321
Grafton, Duke of, see Fitzroy
Graham, family of, 231, 239
— , James, Marquis of Montrose,
229, 234
— , John, of Claverhouse, Viscount
Dundee, 102, 234 and note,
235. 237, 240, 242, 244
Granby, Marquis of, see Manners
Grand Alliance, 117, 118
Granville, Earl, see Carteret
Grasse, Francois Joseph Paul,
Comte de, 310, 314, 317 and
note, 318 and note, 319
Grassmarket (Edinburgh), 241
Graves, Admiral Thomas, after-
wards Lord Graves, 310, 311
Gray, Thomas, 214
' Great Lakes,' the, 191, 197, 207,
208, 217
Great Seal, 76 and note ; Com-
mission to affix, 337
Greek, in Scotland, 279
Green Ribbon Club, 39, 44, 49
Greene, Nathaniel, 303, 309
Greenwich, 12
Grenada, 192, 220, 224, 317, 321
Grenadier Guards, 17
Grenville, family of, 169, 183,
285, 286
— , George, 222, 288, 289, 290, 292,
293
— , Richard Temple, 1st Earl
Temple, 200, 204, 219, 286, 288,
323, 324
— , William, afterwards Lord
Grenville, 320, 327, 330
Grey, Charles, afterwards 2nd
Earl Grey, 335
INDEX
353
Grey, Forde, Lord Grey of Wark,
^istJEarl Tankerville, 37, 53, 54
Grosvenor Square, 152
' Grub Street,' 153
Guadeloupe, 192, 209, 224, 318
Guards, disaffection in the, 161 ;
recruiting for the, 272
Guiana, 104, 192
Guichen, Luc Urbain, Comte de,
314, 316, 317
Guilford, Battle of, 310
Guinea Coast, 9 (note)
Gustavus Adolphus, King of
Sweden, 125
Guthrie, James, 229
Habeas Corpus, Act of, 15, 46
Hague, The, Monmouth at, 47 ;
William at, 60, 70, 84 ; Marl-
borough at, 117, 135, 136, 141
Hair-powder, tax on, 329
Hal, 101
Hale, Sir Matthew, 15
Halifax (Nova Scotia), 193, 300
Halifax, Marquis of, Earl of, see
Savile, Montagu
Hall, Serjeant, 136
Hamilton, 237
Hamilton, Dukes of, see Douglas
— , Lord George, Earl of Orkney,
123, 126, 129, 136
Hampden, John, 35, 36
— , Richard, 36
Hampton Court, 5, 84
Hanau, 179
Handel, George Frederick, 113,
153 (note), 283
Handyside or Handasyde,
General William, 273
Hanover, Electoral family of, 65,
71 ; precautions in Act of
Settlement against, 109 ;
George's visits to, 152 ; George
absolute in, 154 ; its influence
on English position and so-
ciety, 160 ; must be defended,
165, 172 ; George II. goes to,
174 ; George II.'s fear for, 177,
182 ; Carteret accused of favour-
ing, 178 ; her troops at Dettin-
gen, 178 ; defence of, 194, 197,
198 ; troops from, 200, 201 ;
Army of, 202 ; Convention of
Neutrality for, 204, 205 ; French
driven from, 208
Hanoverians, the Scottish, 231,
259, 274, 275 (note)
VOL. Ill
Hapsburg, family of, Spanish
branch of, 98, 104, 105 ; Aus-
trian branch of, 175, 176
Harcourt, Simon, 1st Viscount
Harcourt, 139
Hardwicke, Earl of, see Yorke
Harley, Robert, afterwards Earl
of Oxford, as Secretary of State,
119; playing false, 131; dis-
missed, 134 ; Lord Treasurer,
139 ; character of, 140 ; hesi-
tates on Succession question,
146; dismissed, 147; 155, 161,
167
Harrington, Earl of, see Stan-
hope
Harris, Sir James, afterwards 1st
Earl of Malmesbury, 338
Hastenbeck, 204
Hastings, Francis Rawdon, Lord
Rawdon, afterwards Earl of
Moira and Marquis of Hastings,
302, 309
— , Warren, 320
Havana, 221, 222, 223, 224
Haviland, General William, 217
Havre, 209
Hawke, Sir Edward, 1st Lord
Hawke, 29, 184, 197, 199 (note),
207, 210 and note, 215 ; his
victory at Quiberon, 216 ; 314
Hawley, General Henry, 273,
274
Haymarket Theatre, 112
' Headrigg,' ' Cuthbert,' 236
Hearth Tax, 20, 21
Heathfield, Lord, see Eliott
Henri IV., King of France, 6,
334 (note)
Henry Benedict, Prince, 263,
278
Henry, Patrick, 291
Herbert, Arthur, Earl of Tor-
rington, 83, 98
— , Sir Edward, Chief Justice, 62,
63
— , William, 1st Marquis of Powis,
59
Hesse, Karl, Landgraf of, 71,
194 ; troops from, 200, 201
Hessians hired, 274, 275, 301
Highlanders, quartered on Gal-
loway Lairds, 237 ; Dundee
raises, 242 ; pacification of,
245 ; produce cattle, 251 ;
come to Edinburgh, 253 ; in
1715, 260 ; at Sheriff muir, 261 ;
23
354
INDEX
hunted down, 261 ; will be
loyal, 266 ; join Charles Ed-
ward, 266 ;j Lord G. Murray-
understands, 267 ; at Preston-
pans, 268 ; well behaved, 269 ;
Charles' only aid, 270 ; enter
England, 271 ; did not desert,
272 and note ; reinforcements
of, 273 ; starving, 274 ; ven-
geance on, 275 and note ;
desperate loyalty of, 276
Highlands, regiments raised in
the, 202 and note ; Dundee in
the, 242, 244 ; Jacobitism in,
245 ; Jacobites in, Wade in,
263 ; Charles Edward lands in,
265 ; joy in, 266 ; retreat to
the, 274 ; ' pacification ' of, 275 ;
depopulation of, 277, 281
High Commission, Scottish Court
of, 233
High Street, Edinburgh, 255,
268
Highwaymen, 90 j
Hill, Abigail, 135
Hobbes, Thomas, 14
Hochkirch, 208
Hockley Hole, 113
Hoddesdon, 54
Hogue, Battle of Cape la, 99, 100
Holland, War of 1665-7 with,
27-30 ; Peace of 1667 with, 30 ;
Treaty of 1668 with, 32 ; to be
partitioned, 32 ; War of 1672
against, 32, 33, 34 ; saved
(1672) by William of Orange,
34 ; decline of, 34 ; Alliance
with, 38 ; Shaftesbury in, 53 ;
insurrections start from, 60 ;
Louis XIV. urges James to
attack, 67 ; English regiments
recalled from, 67 ; Hesse will
defend, 71 ; William starts
from, 71, 72 ; Mary's affection
for, 82 ; her Fleet combined with
ours, 98 and note, 99 ; packet
service to, 114 ; France threat-
ening, 118 ; Civil Commis-
sioners of, 120, 123, 124 ; crying
for help, 128 ; Civil Commis-
sioners of, 129, 130 ; ' mis-
leading England,' 137 ; honours
Marlborough, 142 ; unable to
furnish full quota of ships, 142 ;
to garrison Barrier fortresses,
143 ; gets her ' Barrier,' 143 ;
to close the Scheldt, 144 ;
natural ally of England, 158 ;
will not fight (1742), 178 ; in
danger, 182 ; goes to war, 182 ;
neutral in Seven Years' War,
198 ; suffers as a Neutral, 210 ;
Scottish intercourse with, 227,
228, 233, 239, 240, 241 ; 'John
Bull ' hires troops from, 259, 261,
262 ; joins French in American
War, 307, 308 and note, 313 ;
loses her West Indies, 317 and
note ; Triple Alliance with
Prussia and, 338
Holland, Lord, see Fox
Holles, Denzil, Lord Holies, 37,
40
Holmes, Admiral Charles, 206,
210, 211, 212
Holyrood House, Chapel of, 241,
242 ; procession from, 255, 269
' Holy War ' (Bunyan's), 15
Honduras, 192
Hood, Admiral Sir Samuel, after-
wards Viscount Hood, 311, 314,
316, 317, 318
Hough, John, afterwards Bishop
of Worcester, 64
Hounslow, 69, 90
Household, the Royal, 284, 285,
320
House of Commons, a modern,
incompetent, 89 ; ' manage-
ment ' of, 151, 152, 153, 154;
Walpole's management of the,
165 ; the Opposition in the,
168, 169, 170 ; Newcastle job-
bing, 201, 203 ; its struggle
with Wilkes, 288, 289 ; Pitt's
management of, 324, 325 ; Pitt
destroys corruption in, 328 and
note ; Pitt proposes to reform,
33 1 > 334 > attached to Pitt,
334 M
House of Lords, meetings of
(1688), 77 ; debates of 1689
in, 78 ; address to Queen Anne
(17 14), 145 ; passes Peerage
Bill, 162 ; Chatham ranting in,
295 ; rejects Fox's India Bill,
324 ; Pitt's Cabinet largely
chosen from, 327
Howard, Charles, 1st Earl of Car-
lisle, 37
— , Charles, nth Duke of Norfolk,
335
— , Henry, 7th Duke of Norfolk,
63
INDEX
355
Howard, William, Viscount Staf-
ford, 48
— of Escrick, William Howard,
3rd Lord, 37, 54
Howe, Admiral Richard, Earl
Howe, 309, 314, 316
— , George Augustus, 3rd Vis-
count. 208
— , Sir William, 299, 300, 302, 305,
309
' HuDIBRAS,' 13
Hudson Bay Company, 9
Hudson River, 28, 191, 302, 305,
3°9, 310
Hungary, 175, 176, 178
hungerford, 75
Huntley, Marquis of, see Gordon
Huy, 101, 123
Hyde, Anne, first wife of James,
Duke of York, 35
— , Edward, 1st Earl of Clarendon,
22 ; his attitude to Dissenters,
24, 25 ; in Cabinet, 26 ; atti-
tude to Dutch War, 28 ; fall of,
30; exile and death of, 31 ; his
' History of Great Rebellion,' 31 ;
his style, 115 ; hates Scots, 233
— , Henry, 2nd Earl of Claren-
don, 58, 67, 68, 75, 96
— , Laurence, Earl of Rochester,
47. 55. 58, 63, 65, 67, 68, 96,
119, 139
Hyde Park, 13, 113, 161
India, our prestige in, 185 ;
Chatham wishes for Crown
Sovereignty in, 294 ; Russian
designs on, 338
India Bills, Fox's, 323 ; Pitt's, 330
' Indians,' see Red Indians
Indulgence, proposed Declara-
tion of, 1663, 24 ; Declaration
of (1672), 35, 41 ; see also De-
claration
' Industrial Revolution,' the,
279, 287
Inhabited House Duty, 297
Innocent X., Pope, 57, 59, 69
Inverary, 245
Inverness, 260, 270, 274
Inverness-shire, 263
Ipswich, 93
Ireland, disloyalty of, 287 ;
garrison in, 301 ; North's
troubles in, 311 ; Rockingham's
policy in, 320 ; Pitt wants free
trade with, 330
Islands, the Western Scottish, 261
Italy, Campaign in, 119, 120,
128 ; Eugene's Campaigns in,
130 ; neutrality of, 131 ; War
of 1742 in, 177
Jacobites, 80 ; Non-Jurors, 81 ;
on ' God's Wrath,' 90 ; plots of,
95. 99. io 3 I denounce Army,
106 ; Louis XIV. abandons,
143 ; hopes of the, 145, 146,
147, 148 ; Rising of (1715), 161,
168 ; danger from, 165 ; their
leader in Parliament, 169 ;
plans of (1744), 181 ; Rising
of (1745), 182, 183, 184 ; the
Scottish, 231 ; the victims of
1746, 240 ; in the Convention, »
242 ; win Killiecrankie, 244 ;
in prison, danger of a landing
of, 252 ; at time of Union, 253 ;
rely on France, 256 ; division
of, weakness of (1715), 258,
259 ; courage of, 262 ; certain
to rise again, 263 ; Association
of, 264 ; the Ladies, 269 ;
slackness of the English, 271
Jamaica, 192, 221, 315, 318, 319
James L, 108 ; as James VI. of
Scotland, 269
James II., as Duke of York : New
York called after, 28 ; as Ad-
miral, 29 ; in command at sea,
29 ; in Cabinet, 31 ; convert to
Catholicism, 33 ; his second
marriage, 33 ; resigns Admiralty,
35 ; designs of Jesuits on, 41, 42 ;
Exclusion of, suggested, 43, 44,
46, 49, 51, 52 ; goes to Scot-
land, 45 ; indicted as Popish
recusant, 49 ; in danger, 54 ; as
King ; character of, 56, 57 ; first
steps of, 57, 58 ; his councillors,
58, 59 ; his Parliament, 60, 62 ;
a Dutch life of, 61 (note) ;
employs Catholics, 62 ; claims
Dispensing power, 62, 63 ; ap-
points Ecclesiastical Commis-
sion, 63 ; his treatment of
Oxford and Cambridge, 64, 65 ;
turns to Dissenters, 65 ; pre-
pares for a sham Parliament,
66 ; goes to St. Winifred's Well,
67 ; refuses to listen to Louis
XIV., 67, 71 ; issues Declara-
tion of Indulgence, 68 ; prose-
cutes Seven Bishops, 69 ; his
356
INDEX
son born, 69, 70 ; Will he
fight ?, 72, 73, 74, 75 ; reverses
his policy, 72 ; watches the
weather, 73 ; listens to
Louis XIV., 73 ; at Salisbury,
74, 75 ; returns to London, 75 ;
flies to France, 76 ; ' hath abdi-
cated,' 78 ; his coaches sold,
80 ; an impossible person, 80 ;
statesmen intrigue with, 86, 96,
97, 99 ; his revenue, 88 ; his
camp at Hounslow, 94 ; death
of, 107 ; father of Marshal
Berwick, 128 ; his Colonial
policy, 188 ; as James VII. of
Scotland : Scotland's loyalty to,
231 ; Conventicles in his reign,
235 ; in Scotland, 238 ; against
Argyll, 239 ; visits Scotland
again, becomes King, 240 ; or-
ders pictures, 269 ; his folly,
241 ; deserts Scottish loyalists,
242 ; loyalty of Church of
Scotland to, 243 ; gives Com-
mission to Dundee, 244 ; death
of, 252
James Francis Edward, as
Prince of Wales, 69, 70, 74,
75 ; character of, 80, 81 ;
as 'James III.,' 107, 108;
at Oudenarde, 133 ; to be
excluded from France, 143 ;
question of his succession,
145, 146, 147, 148 ; Whigs
hostile to, 157 ; 'to receive
Hanover,' 160 ; betrayed by
Bolingbroke, 161, 167 ; Spain
supports, 163 ; Shippen con-
sults, 169 ; English Jacobites
fail, 183 ; as ' James VIII.' of
Scotland : recognized by France,
252 ; attempts for, 253 ; starts
for Scotland, driven back, 256 ;
character of, 257, 258, 278 ; in-
surrection of 1 7 15 for, 258, 259,
260, 261 ; delays of, 260 ;
comes to Scotland, 261 ; retires
to Rome, 262 ; insurrection of
17 19 for, 263 ; his marriage,
263 ; sends Charles a Com-
mission, 264 ; apathy of Eng-
land to, 271, 273
Jefferson, Thomas, 291
Jeffreys, Sir George, Lord
Jeffreys, 15, 58, 61, 62, 63
Jenkinson, Charles, 1st Earl of
Liverpool, 330
Jennings, Sarah, see Marlborough,
Duchess of
Jermyn, Henry, 1st Lord Dover,
59
Jersey, Isle of, 31
Jesuits, plotting, 41, 42, 43, 48 ;
trials of, 43 ; under James II.,
activity of, 57, 59, 65, 67, 78 ;
missionary zeal of, 190
Jews, 185
Johnson, Samuel, 153
Johnstone, Archibald, of Warris-
toun, 229
Joseph I., Emperor, 127, 131,
137. M 1
Joshua, 322
Judges, tenure of the, 109
Juncto, see Cabinet
Jurisprudence, Scottish, 251,
254, 280
Juxon, Archbishop William, 22
Katharine, Queen of Charles II.,
9, 26 ; proposal to divorce, 46 ;
insults to, 48 ; at Oxford, 50 ;
69
Katharine II., Czarina of Russia,
223, 308 (note)
Keith, George, Earl Marischal,
263
Kellly, George, 265
Ken, Thomas, Bishop of Bath
and Wells, 15, 68
Kenmure, Lord, see Gordon
Kensington, 112
Kensington Palace, 84, 147,
148, 272
Kent, garrisoned by Germans,
200
Keppel, Admiral Augustus, Vis-
count Keppel, 219, 315, 319
— , George, 3rd Earl of Albemarle,
222
Ker of Graden, Colonel Henry,
269
Kew, 284
Killiecrankie, Battle of, 244
' Killing Times,' the, 228, 240
Kilmarnock, 250
Kilmarnock, Earl of, see Boyd
' King of Prussia,' the, 225 and
note
Kingsburgh, Alexander Mac-
donald of, 276
' King's Friends,' the Party of,
286, 295, 296, 327, 335
Kingsland, 90
INDEX
357
King's Mountain, 309
Kirk of Scotland, factions
in the, 228 ; moderates of,
229, 230 ; ' outed ' ministers
of, 232, 233, 234 ; they hold
Conventicles, 235, 236, 237 ;
insurrections of fanatics of,
236, 237, 238 ; settled at Re-
volution, 243, 244, 246, 247,
248 ; its ignorance and intoler-
ance, 251, 253 ; its supremacy,
255 ; growing tolerance in,
278, 279
— , General Assembly of, 227, 230,
246, 247
Kirk Sessions, 230, 279
Kirke, Colonel Percy, 61
Klosterseven, Convention of,
204, 205, 206
Knox, John, 239
Kollin, 204
kunersdorf, 215
La Bassee, 136, 138
Ladenburg, 124
La Galissoniere, Roland Michel,
Marquis de, 189, 193, 200
Lagos, 215
Lake, John, Bishop of Chichester,
68, in
Lamb art, Colonel Hamilton, 219
' Lammermoor,' ' The Bride of,'
239
Lancashire, 261, 262
Landau, 127
Landen, Battle of, 94, 102, 128
Land Tax, of William III., 91 ;
under Walpole, 171
Lansdowne, Marquis of, see
Petty
La Salle, Robert de, 189, 191
Latin, in Scotland, 279
' La Tulipe/ name for French
Private Soldier, 133
Laud, William, Archbishop of
Canterbury, 4, 230, 232
Lauderdale, Duke of, see Mait-
land
Lauffeldt, Battle of, 182
' Law of Nature,' nonsense
talked about, 291, 300, 301
Law, William, 150
Lee, General Robert, 303
Leech, John, 93
Leeward Islands, see West
Indies
Legacy Duty, 329
Legge, George, 1st Lord Dart-
mouth, 72, 73
— , Henry Bilson, 204
Leighton, Alexander, 232
— , Robert, Bishop of Dunblane,
afterwards Archbishop of Glas-
gow, 232, 236, 237
Lennox, Charles, 3rd Duke of
Richmond, 333
Leopold L, Emperor, 39, 40, 41,
60, 98, 104, 105, 124, 127
Leslie, John, 7th Earl, 1st Duke
of Rothes, 235
Lestock, Richard, Admiral, 180
(note)
Leuthen, 205
Levant Company, 9
Levis, Francois Gaston, Due de,
211, 214
Lexington, Battle of, 299
Libel, Law of, 20
Licensing Act, 20
Lichfield, 272
Liege, ioi, 123
Liegnitz, 217
' Life Guards,' the, 17, 49, 122
Ligonier, John, afterwards Earl
Ligonier, 199 (note), 206, 220
Lille, 133
' LlLLIBURLERO,' 67
' Limitations,' the Scottish, 254
Lindsay, Colin, 3rd Earl of
Balcarres, 242
Lippe-Buckeburg, Wilhelm,
Count of, 223
Lisbon, 114, 223
' Little Lakes,' 191, 197, 206,
207, 211
Liverpool, trade of, seventeenth
century, 11
Liverpool, Earl of, see Jenkinson
Lloyd, William, Bishop of St.
Asaph, 68
Lochiel, see Cameron of Lochiel
LOCH-NA-NUAGH, 277
Locke, John, 37, 50, 51 (note), 96
Lockhart of Carnwath, George,
253
London, French weavers in, 10;
trade of, seventeenth century,
11; centre of fashion, 12, 13;
Plague of, 26 ; fire of, 27 ;
rebuilding of, 27 ; hostile to
Dutch, 28 ; Whiggery of, 37,
48, 53, 54 ; Papists dismissed
from, 43 ; Shaftesbury hiding
in, 53 ; forfeiture of charter of,
358
INDEX
54 ; the Seven Bishops in, 68,
69 ; James returns to, 75 ;
mob riots in, 75 ; James re-
turns to and flies from, 76 ;
William III. comes to, 77 ;
merchants of, 92 ; amusements
of, 113 ; post within, 114 ;
mad over Sacheverell, 138 ;
will not hoot Eugene, 141 ;
disturbed condition of,
George I., 161 ; her merchants
petition against Spain, 172 ;
brutal mob of, 184 ; Argyll
scolded in, 261 ; Scots tried in,
262 ; no defences of, 269, 271,
272 ; Charles Edward advances
towards, 270 ; panic in, 272 ;
Scottish executions in, 277 ;
contrasted with Edinburgh, 280;
Gordon Riots in, 282, 312 and
(note) ; Wilkes riots in, 289 ;
corruption of modern Guar-
dians of the Poor in, 332 ; fears
to lose Pitt, 337
London Bridge, 12
* London Gazette,' 13
'Long Island,' the (Scotland), 265
Lord Mayor, at the Fire of
London, 27 ; called to an
Assembly, 1688, 77
Lords of the Articles, 228, 235,
248, 249
Lorne, Lord, see Campbell Archi-
bald, 9th Earl of Argyll
Lorraine, Duchy of, 105, 175,
176
— , James III. in, 143, 145
Lorraine, Leopold Charles
Joseph, Duke of, 139
— , Francis, Stephen, Duke of, 183
Loudoun, Earl of, see Campbell
Louis XIV., bigotry of, 10 ;
subsidizes Charles II., Treaty
with, 32, 33 ; Charles deceives,
34, 38 ; his aggressions, 39 ;
bribes English Parliament, 40 ;
makes Peace of Nimeguen, 41 ;
uses Jesuits, 42 ; attacks Lux-
emburg, 55 ; his advice to
James II., 55 ; persecuting
Protestants, 57 ; William hates,
59 ; aggressions of, 60 ; offers
James alliance, 67 ; attacks
Philipsburg, 71 ; James offers
alliance to, 73 ; receives James
in exile, 76 ; danger from (1689),
78 ; William will humble, 84 ;
his army, 94 ; his riches, 99 ;
his Flemish campaigns, 100 ;
makes Peace of Ryswick, 103 ;
Marlborough and, 103 (note) ;
on Spanish succession, 104, 105 ;
makes Partition Treaties, 105 ;
perjured, 106, 107 ; recognizes
James III., 107, ^252 ; will help
Jacobites, 256 ; death of, 258 ;
Spain will support, 118 ; Eu-
gene's hatred for, 119 ; his
present to Elector of Bavaria,
123 ; what he would say about
Blenheim, 126 ; inclined to
yield (1706), 130 ; concludes
Treaty for Italy, 131 ; offers
peace, 135, 137 ; appeals to his
people, 135 ; offers Marlborough
a bribe, 137 ; renews offers of
peace, 138, 139 ; deaths in his
family, 141 ; concludes Peace,
142, 143, 144 ; irritation of,
151 ; France after his death,
158
Louis XV., 141 ; his throne
coveted by Philip V., 158, 159 ;
his son born, 159 ; at Fontenoy,
182, 185 ; listens to Maria
Theresa, 194, 195 ; unwilling
for war, 197 ; sends army over
Rhine, 201 ; unready for war,
203 ; can spare no troops for
Canada, 207 ; receives Charles
Edward, 264 ; is for ' Peace at
any price,' 296 ; death of, 306
Louis XVI., accession of, 306 ;
his health proposed, 322
Louis, Dauphin, son of Louis
XIV., 104, 105
LOUISBURG, l82, 185, 191, I94,
206, 207, 208, 209, 2IO
Louisiana, 191, 192, 224
Louvain, 129, 131
Louvois, Francois Michel Le Tel-
lier, Marquis do, 71
Lovat, Lord, see Fraser
Loyalists, the American, 298,
302, 311, 320, 322
Ludgate Hill, 161
Ludlow, Edmund, 19
Ludwig Wilhelm, Margrave of
Baden, 120, 124, 125
Lumley, Richard, 1st Lord Lum
ley (afterwards 1st Earl of
Scarborough), 70
Luttrell, Narcissus, 113, 138
LUTZINGEN, 125, 126
INDEX
359
Luxemburg, 55
Luxemburg, Francis Henri de
Montmorenci, Due de, Marshal,
101, 102, 103
Lyme, 60
Lyons, 307
Lys, River, 135
Lyttelton, family of, 169, 183-
' Macalpin,' ' Janet,' 281
— , ' Sergeant More,' 281
' Macbriar,' ' Ephraim,' 235
Macclesfield, 271
Macdonald, family of, 231, 260,
265, 266, 275
— , Flora, 276
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 80, 176,
326
Mack ay, family of, 231
— , Hugh, 74, 102, 242, 244, 245
Mackenzie, of Rosehaugh, Sir
George, 234, 243
— , William, 5th Earl of Seaforth,
263
Mackintosh, William, Brigadier,
260, 271
Macleod, Clan of, 274, 275 (note)
Macpherson, Clan of, 267
Madras, 182, 185, 222
Madrid, 128, 134, 263
Magdalen College, Oxford, 64,
70, 73. 137
Main, River, 178, 179
Mainz, 124
Maitland, John, Duke of Lauder-
dale, 31, 229, 234, 236, 237, 240,
248
Malaga, 127
Malplaquet, Battle of, 121, 136,
261
Malta, 134
Malt Tax, 257 (note)
Manchester, 271
Manchester, Earl of, see Montagu
Manila, 221, 222, 224
Manners, John, Marquis of
Granby, 217, 223, 225, 271
(note)
Mansfield, Earl of, see Murray
Manton, Dr. Thomas, 139
Manufactures, Scottish, 248,
250, 251, 256, 280
Mar, Earl of, see Erskine
Margate, 83
Maria Theresa, Empress, 175,
176, 177, 180, 182, 183 ; seeking
French alliance, 194, 195 ; con-
spiring against Frederick, 197 ;
concludes Treaties with France,
198, 201, 204 ; to be ' polished
off,' 202 ; her Allies, 204
Marie Antoinette, Queen of
France, 306
Marie Galante, 192, 220, 224
Marines, first regiment of, 17
Marlborough, Duke of, see
Churchill
— , Sarah, Duchess of, no, in,
117, 130, 135, 138
Marriage Laws (Hardwicke's
Act), 185
Marryat, Captain Frederick,
' Poor Jack,' 225 (note)
Marsin, Ferdinand, Comte de,
Marshal, 126
Martinique, 192, 209, 219, 220,
221, 224, 318
Mary L, Queen, 15, 75
Mary II. , Queen, 28. A s Princess :
her marriage, 35, 39 ; as possible
Regent, 46, 51 ; heiress of
England, 59, 63, 67, 73 ; her
letter to Anne, 68, 70 ; as
Queen : declared Queen, 79, 80 ;
crown settled on, 81 ; her char-
acter and Memoirs, 81, 82, 83 ;
William unfaithful to, 84 ; on
insolence of Englishmen, 86 ;
her death, 95 ; left as Regent,
82, 83, 97, 99 ; her opinion of
Peterborough, 128
Mary Beatrice, Queen of James
II. , 33, 42 ; with child, 67 ; birth
of her son, 69, 70 ; welcomed in
France, 76, 240
Maseyk, 123
Masquerades, 153
Massachusetts, 292, 295, 298
Mastricht, ioi, 123, 124, 129
Mathews, Thomas, Admiral, 180
and note
Mauritius, 217, 219
Maxen, 215
Maxim Guns, 106 (note)
Maxwell, William, 5th Earl of
Nithsdale, 260, 264
6th (titular) Earl of Niths-
dale, 269
Mechlin, 129
Mecklenburg-Strelitz, see Char-
lotte, Queen
Medway, River, Dutch fleet in
the, 30
Mehaigne, River, 128
360
INDEX
' Melincourt,' 331 (note)
Menin, 130
Men Servants, tax on, 297,
329
Merton College, Oxford, 50
Methodists, 150
Methuen, Paul, 144, 145
Meuse, River, 101, 102, 123, 128
Mexico, Gulf of, 174
Middlesex, 289
Middleton, John, ist Earl of
Middleton, 229, 235
Milan, Duchy of, 104, 105, 130,
144, 158, 159, 175
Militia, weakness of, 61, 62 ;
praised, 94 ; Bill to revive the
(1757), 198, 201 and note ; the
American, 299, 304, 305
Milton, John, 13, 115, 246, 276
Minden, Battle of, 215, 217, 225
Minorca, 33 ; capture of, 134 ;
cession of, 143 ; 159, 198, 200,
201, 209, 219, 224, 301, 313, 314,
315, 316, 321
Miquelon, Island of, 224
Mississippi, River, 191, 224, 297,
322
Modena, Mary of, see Mary
Beatrice
Moffat, 271
Moira, Lord, see Hastings
Monckton, Colonel Robert, 197,
208, 210, 213
Mondelheim, 124
Monk, George, ist Duke of
Albemarle, 16, 17, 25, 29, 30
Monmouth, Duke of, see Crofts
— , Earl of, see Mordaunt
Mons, 101, 130, 136
Montagu, Charles, Earl of Halifax,
96
— , Edward, 2nd Earl of Man-
chester, 25
— , — , ist Earl of Sandwich, 33
— , John, 4th Earl of Sandwich,
299, 314. 317
— , Lady Mary Wortley, 152
Montcalm, Louis Joseph, Marquis
de, 206, 208, 211, 212, 213
' Montgomery's Regiment,' 202
(note)
Montmorency, River, 211
Montreal, 208, 211, 213, 214, 217
218
Montrose, 261
Montrose, Marquis of, see Graham
Moray Firth, 274
Mordaunt, Charles, 3rd Earl of
Peterborough, 83, 120, 127, 128
Morice, Sir William, 31
Morley, George, Bishop of Win-
chester, 22
Moselle, River, 124, 127, 128
' Muckle wrath,' ' Habakkuk,'
235
' Mug-houses,' 161
Mun, Thomas, 10
Munchausen, Baron Adolf Gerlach
von, 160
Murray, Lord George, 263, 267,
268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275
— , General James, 208, 210, 214,
217
— , John, ist Duke of Atholl, 242
— , Lord William, 2nd Lord Nairn,
262
— or Nairn, John, 3rd Lord
Nairn, 269
— , William, 1st Earl of Mansfield,
194, 290
— , — , Marquis of Tullibardine,
rightfully Duke of Atholl, 263,
265, 267, 269, 275
— of Broughton, John, 264,
265, 266, 277
Mutiny Act, 93, 94
Nairn, 274
Nairn, Lord, see Murray
Namur, 101, 103, 128, 130
Nantes, 265 ; Edict of, revoked, 60
Naples, Kingdom of (see also
Sicilies, Kingdom of the Two),
104, 105, 130, 144, 158, 173
Napoleon, Emperor, 92, 187, 295
Narborough, Sir John, 29
Naseby, Battle of, 275
Nassau, 74
National Debt, origin of the,
32 ; in William III., 91 ; growth
of, 92 ; South Sea Company and
the, 163 ; reduction of Interest
on the, 170 ; Sinking Fund for
the, 171 ; Charles Edward de-
nounces, 270 ; Pitt's plan for
reducing, 329, 330
National Defence Bill, 198,
201
Navigation Act, ii, 12, 289, 311;
Scotland excluded from benefits
of, 227, 248, 250 ; the Scottish
Act, 248
Navy (of Charles II.), 28-38 ; of
James II., 72, 73, 74 ; William
INDEX
361
III.'s use of, 84 ; wrecks in
1689 and 1703, 90 ; favoured
by Parliament, 94 ; Russell's
administration of, 97, 98, 99 ;
to be strengthened, 106 ; at
Toulon (1707), 131, 132 ; re-
cruiting for, 132 ; takes Minorca,
134 ; neglect of, after 1714, 150 ;
difficulty of recruiting for, 177 ;
at Toulon (1744), 180 and note ;
victories of, 184, 185 ; in Seven
Years' War, cruising in Atlantic,
195 ; scattered, 200 ; Pitt's use
of, 205, 206 ; at Carthagena,
207 ; at Louisburg, 208 ; in
Atlantic, 209, 215, 219 ; at
Quiberon, 216 ; in Canada, 210,
211, 212, 214 ; in East Indies,
217, 222 ; in West Indies 209,
220, 221, 226 ; jobbery in, 285 ;
in American War, figures of,
301 ; true function of, 304, 305 ;
takes French ships, 306 ; coali-
tion against, 307, 313 ; France
seldom fights, 308, 315 ; in West
Indies, 310, 317, 318 ; fails to
relieve Cornwallis, 311, 318 ; in
East Indies, 313 ; recruiting
for, 313 (note) ; off Ushant, 315 ;
scattered all over World, 314 ;
relieves Gibraltar, 315, 316 ;
Neckar, River, 124
Neerspecken, 102
Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson,
29, I34> 3H
Netherbow, the (Edinburgh),
268
Netherlands, the Spanish, see
Flanders, Belgium
Neutrals, Choiseul plans to use
the, 221 ; suffer in war time, 210
Newcastle-on-Tyne, 114, 268
Newcastle, Duke of ; see Pelham-
Holles
New England, {see also Massa-
chusetts), 188, 189, 289, 302, 304
Newfoundland, 121, 189, 224
322 ; becomes English, 143
and note
' New France,' 190
Newgate, 161
New Jersey, 30, 188, 305
Newmarket, 5, 54
New Orleans, 191
Newspapers, 114
Newton, Sir Isaac, 14, 96
New York, 28, 30, 114, 188, 189,
190, 191, 292, 297, 298, 305, 309,
310, 311, 316
Nimeguen, 39, 41, 123
' Nineteen,' The (Insurrection of
1719), 263, 265, 267
Nithsdale, Earl of, see Maxwell
Noailles, Adrien Maurice, Due
de, Marshal, 178, 179
Noix (Isle aux), 211, 217
' Non-Jurors,' the, 81, in, 149
— , the Scottish, 243, 247, 256,
278
Nootka Sound, 338
Norfolk, Duke of, see Howard
Norris, Admiral Sir John, 264
North, Sir Dudley, 10
— , Frederick, Lord North, 284
(note) ; takes Office, 296 ; ability
of, 297 ; closes Boston Port, 298 ;
has country behind him, 299 ;
weakness of, 299, 305 ; wishes
to resign, his troubles, 311, 313 ;
resigns, 319 ; coalesces with Fox,
321, 323, 325, 329, 336, 337
— , Roger, 12
' North Briton,' the, 288
Northumberland, 260
Northumberland, Earl of, see
Percy
Nottinghamshire, 75
Nova Scotia, ceded to England,
143 and note, 194, 197
' No-vote,' City of, 331
Nuncio, a Papal, 65
Oates, Titus, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48
' Oath of Assurance,' 247, 248
Occasional Conformity Bill,
131, 140
October Club, 139
Ogilvy, David, 5th Earl of Airlie,
269, 275
— , family of, 231, 239
— , James, 1st Earl of Seafield,
253. 255
Oglethorpe, General James Ed-
ward, 189
Ohio, River, 191, 193, 194, 297,
322
Old Sarum, 331
Oliphant of Gask, Laurence, 269
' One-Vote,' Borough of, 331
Ontario, Lake, 208
Opdam, Jacob Wassenaer van, 29
Opera, the, 113, 153
Opposition, rise of the, 159, 160;
in George III., bribing and
362
INDEX
jobbing, 285 ; favours Wilkes,
288 ; on American War, 294,
296 ; denouncing Army, 302 ;
traitorous conduct of/303
Orange, Prince of, see William III.
Orkney Islands, 241
Orkney, Earl of, see Hamilton
Ormond, Duke of, see Butler
Orvilliers, Louis Guillouet,
Comte d', 314, 315
Osborne, Admiral Henry, 207
— , Sir Thomas, afterwards Earl
of Danby, Marquis of Car-
marthen and Duke of Leeds,
35. 3 8 > 39, 4°, 43, 44, 67, 70,
75, 79, 83, 86, 97, 155
OSTEND, I30, I32
Oswald, Richard, 322
Ottery, 74
Oudenarde, Battle of, 121, 130,
132, 133, 261
Oxford, Court at (1665), 27 ; the
Gazette, 13 ; Mayor and Cor-
poration of, in prison, 332 ;
Parliament of 1681 at, 49, 50,
51 ; Royal Society at, 14 ;
troops sent to, 250 ; James mis-
handles University Of, 64
1 \\< kk 1 Boa 1 s, 1 1 1
Palace Yard, Westminster, 289
' Palatines,' in British Colonies,
189
Pall Mall, 161
Palmer, Roger, Earl ol Castle
tnaine, 59
Panama, 143, 249, 250
Pantomimes, 153
' Paradisic Lost,' 13
' Paradise Regained,' 13
Paris, Charles Edward in,
Chatham watching, 304 ; dis-
tress in, 135 ; Peace of (1703),
224, denounced, 288, 293 ;
the storm brewing in, ^H
Parker, Dr. Samuel, Bishop of
Oxford, 64
Parliament, of 1661, 16 ; re-
ligious temper of, 22, 23, 24,
25 ; demands Peace, 34 ; re-
jects Declaration of Indulgence,
35 ; passes Test Act, 35 ;
changed opinions of, 36 ; Whig
party in, 37 sqq. ; long proro-
gations of, 39 ; bribed by
Louis XIV., 40 ; violence of,
43; dissolved, 44; (of 1679),
44, 45, 46 ; (of 1680), 49 ;
(of 1681), 49, 50, 51 ; in-
termission of, 55 ; (of 1685),
60, 61, 62 ; James prepares foi
sham, 66, 70 ; for a free, 73 ;
William demands a free, 73 ;
' to be held frequently,' 80 ;
William cannot manage, 85 ;
factiousness of, 86, 87, 95, 105,
106 ; obtains control of purse,
87, 88, 89 ; becomes Protec-
tionist, 90 ; obtains control of
Army, 93, 94 ; settles Suc-
cession, 108, 109 ; (of 1689),
79, 87 ; (of 1698), 106 ; (of
1701), 107 ; factions in Anne's
reign in, 116, 117; corruption of ,
in eighteenth century, 150, 151,
I 54, T 55> J 56; omnipotence of,
162 ; elections to, 162 ; Walpole's
power in, 170, 171 ; legislates
for Colonies, 188 ; jealous
of Scottish competition, 250 ;
Scottish representation in, 254 ;
George II. addressing (1745),
267 ; could control any Km
278 ; family influence in, 284,
285, 286 ; Royal influence in,
285, 286 ; Wilkes' agitation in,
288 ; mob coercion of, 289 ;
conciliatory measures in, 298 ;
North's majority in, 299 ; earn
paign of faction in, 302, 303 ;
privileges of, 324 ; Pitt puri-
fies, 328 ; Reform of, proposed,
33°. 334 : duration of, 333
PARLIAMENT, the Scottish, re-
stored, 227 ; its character, 228 ;
repeals Acts since 1639, 229 ;
its moderation, 230 ; its ' p<
cuting ' Acts, 235; in 1681,
238, 239 ; loyal to James VII.,
240, 241 ; at the Revolution
[see also Convention), 243, 244 ;
holds enquiry about Glcncoc,
246; settles the Kirk, 2.17 ; im-
poses de jure oath, 248 ; its
commercial grievances, 248 ;
its political weakness, 248; its
Darien Scheme, 249; the I.isi
meeting of, 253, 254, 255 ;
lament for the, 255
Partition, Treaties of (11
1700), io^, 105
'Pastorals' (Pope's), 114
Paterson, William, 92, 249
' Patriot King,' the, 155
INDEX
363
Patronage, in Scottish Kirk,
256, 278
Pauperism, 9, 280
Peacock, Thomas Love, 331
Peden, Alexander, 234
Peerage Bill, 162 and note
Pelham, family of, 286
— , Henry, 170, 177, 181, 182,
183, 185, 186, 194, I95» 2 °3
Pelham-Holles, Thomas, Duke
of Newcastle, 155, 170, 177,
181, 185, 186, 194, 195, 197,
198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 209,
219, 223, 285, 286, 287, 293,
294
Penn, William, 65
Pennsylvania, 188, 291, 297, 305
Penrith, 273
Pentland Firth, 274
Pepys, Mrs., 9
— , Samuel, 12, 29
Percy, Algernon, 10th Earl of
Northumberland, 25
Perth, Mar at, 260, 261 ; Charles
Edward at, 267
Perth, Earl of, Duke of, see
Drummond
Peter III., Czar of Russia, 221,
223
Peterborough, Earl 01, see Mor-
daunt
Peters, Hugh, 18
Peterhead, 261
Petitions, declared lawful, 80 ;
Statute of Tumultuous, 20
Petre, Edward, Father, 59, 67,
69
Pett, Peter, 29
Petty, Sir William, 10
— , William, 3rd Earl of Shel-
burne, 1st Marquis of Lans-
downe, 286, 290, 293, 296, 319,
320, 321, 323, 324, 327
Petworth, 120, 175
Philadelphia, 196, 300, 305, 309
Philip V., King of Spain, 105,
118, 128, 130, 134, 135, 139,
141, 142, 143, 144 ; covets
France, 158, 159 ; resents
Gibraltar, 159 ; 163, 165, 173,
258
Philip, Duke of Orleans, Regent
of France, 258
Philippine Islands, 104, 222
Philipsburg, 71
Piccadilly, 112
Piedmontese, Army of, 104
'Pilgrim's Progress' (Bunyan's),
15. 25
Pinney, case of Rex v. Pinney,
312 (note)
Pitsligo, Lord, see Forbes
Pitt, William, 1st Earl of Chat-
ham, his views on India, 141 ;
pupil of Carteret, 167, 168 ;
appears in Parliament, 169 ;
leads the Opposition, 174 ;
Pelham intrigues with, 181 ; his
later designs, 182 ; becomes
Paymaster, 183, 186 ; can-
didate for office, 194 ; his
National Defence Bill, 198 ;
character of, 198, 199 and
note ; becomes Secretary of
State, 200 ; carries Militia
Bill, 201 and note ; dismissed,
202 ; returns to office, 203 ;
his first efforts as War Minister,
204, 205 ; supports Prussia,
206 ; conciliates Colonists, 206 ;
plans the whole war, 207 ;
reinforces Ferdinand, orders
descents on French coast, 209,
216 ; runs risk of invasion,
210 ; wants to attack Mauri-
tius, 217 ; wants to attack
Spain, 218, 219, 220 ; sends
expedition to Belleisle, 219 ;
resigns, 220 ; his plans carried
out, 222 ; Newcastle against,
223 ; Treaty of Paris, 224 ;
free from party ties, 286 ;
in the sulks, 287 ; depen-
dent on Temple, 288 ; seduced
by Franklin, 291 ; denounces
Peace of Paris, becomes
Earl of Chatham, 293 ; his
grandiose schemes (1766), 294 ;
resigns office, 295 ; cries for
war, 296 ; denounces North,
296 ; his gift for choosing men,
299 ; factious conduct of, 302 ;
watching France, 304 ; death
of, 308 ; could he have saved
America ?, 311 ; his name
strengthens his son, 325 ; had
trained his son, 326 ; might
have saved Europe, 326, 327 ;
a tamer of kings, 326 and note ;
in favour of Reform, 331 ; a
' nominee,' 332 ; for a Triennial
Bill, 333 ; his ' tomahawk,'
337
— , William (Junior), 86 ; carries
364
INDEX
Excise scheme, 172 ; 'a Tory,'
284 (note) ; becomes Chan-
cellor of Exchequer, 320 ;
George approaches, 323 ; be-
comes Prime Minister, 324, 325 ;
character of, 325, 326 ; his first
Cabinet, 327 ; George's rela-
tion to, 327, 328 ; his zeal for
great causes, 328 ; his financial
policy, 328 and note, 329, 330 ;
his East India Bill, on Slave
Trade, 330 ; on Parliamentary
Reform, 331, 334, 335 ; blamed
for not resigning, 335 ; at the
Regency Crisis, 336, 337 ; foreign
policy of, 337, 338 ; reduces ex-
penditure on armaments, 337
' Pretender,' King James III.
called, 259 ; Prince Charles
Edward called, 266
Place Bill (1694, 1706), 87
Plague (of 1665), 26, 27, 29
Plassey, Battle of, 209
' Plate Fleet,' the Spanish, 220
Plot, Robert, 14
Plymouth, 90, 210, 215, 216
Pocock, Admiral Sir George, 217,
221, 222
Poland, 197
Pollock, John, author of the
' Popish Plot,' 42
Poll Tax, 91
Pondicherry, fall of, 217
Poole, R. L., ' Historical Atlas,'
143 (note)
Pope, Alexander, 114, 153
Pope, the, burned in effigy, 48
' Popish Plot,' the, 41 sqq.
' Porpoise,' the, 74
' Porteous Riot,' 264, 279
Portland, Earl of, Duke of, see
Bentinck
Port Mahon, 200, 315
portobello, i43, i74
Porto Rico, 192
Portugal, alliance with, 26 ;
joins Alliance (1704), 127, 128 ;
Methuen's Treaty with, 145 ;
Spain attacks (1762), 221, 222,
223
Post, within London, 114
Post Office, 21
Powis, Marquis of, see Herbert
Prague, 204
Prance, Miles, 43
Pratt, Charles, 1st Earl Camden,
294' 319
Prayer Book, alterations in, 22 ;
used in Scotland, 278
Prelacy, a ' grievance ' to Scot-
land, 243
Prestonpans, Battle of, 196
(note), 268, 274
Pride, Thomas, 41
Prideaux, Humphrey, 50
' Prime Minister,' unpopularity
of title, 26 ; origin of, Walpole
the first real, 164
Primrose, Archibald Philip, 5th
Earl of Rosebery, 327
' Principia ' (Newton's), 14
Privateers, French, 100
Privy Council, decay of the, 7,
8, 11 ; Presbyterians in, 25 ;
Committees of, 25 ; new scheme
for, 45 ; of James II., 57, 59 ;
in Act of Settlement, 109
— (Scottish), 233, 234, 239, 241,
242, 249
Privy Seal, Office of the Lord, 293
Prize Fighters, 113 and note
Presbyterians, the London, 25 ;
the English, 65, 71 ; under
Toleration Act, 87
— , Presbyterianism (in Scot-
land), 231, 232, 240, 244, 247,
250, 253, 279
Preston, 261
Protection, Scottish measures of,
248
Protectorate, the, in Scotland,
227
Protestants, French, immi-
grants, 10
' Protesters,' 228
Prussia, joins Grand Alliance, 98 ;
a coming Power, 159 ; Treaty
of 1727 with, 165 ; in danger
(1756), 194, 197, 204; takes
offensive, 201 ; her interests
coincide with English, 202 ;
financial methods of, 206 (note) ;
subsidized by England, 206 ;
Chatham seeks alliance with,
294 ; in the Armed Neutrality
of 1780, 307 ; Triple Alliance
with Holland and, 338
Pudding Lane, London, 27
Pulteney, Sir William, after-
wards Earl of Bath, 164, 169,
177. 183
Purcell, Henry, 13
Pym, John, 20
Pyrenees, the, 99
INDEX
365
Quakers, 65, 150 ; in America,
188, 197, 271 (note)
Quebec, 121, 207, 208, 210, 211,
212, 213, 214, 216, 217, 300
— Act, 297 and note, 322, 337
Queensberry, Dukes of, see
Douglas
QUEENSFERRY, 238
Quiberon Bay, Battle of, 21 6'
Radcliffe, James, 3rd Earl of
Derwentwater, 260, 262
Radicalism, birth of, 287, 289 ;
nature of, 298
Ramillies, Battle of, 121, 129, 256
Ramsay, Colonel, 102
— (or Ramezay), Le Chevalier de,
213
' Rape of the Lock,' 114
Rawdon, Lord, see Hastings
Recruiting, difficulty of, 121
' Red Indians,' 114, 188, 189, 190
and note, 206, 208, 304
Redistribution Bills, 334 (note)
' Reform,' ' Reform Bills,' Pitt's
proposal, 331 and note, 332, 333,
334 and note ; Radical proposals
for. 334
Regency, proposals for a (1689),
7 8 > 79
— of Mary II., 82, 83, 97, 99 ; of
a Committee of Peers, 97
— , Council of (171 4), 146
Regency Bill (1788), Crisis of
the, 335, 336, 337
Regicides, fate of the, 18, 19
Reid, Thomas, 279
Relief Bills, to Catholics and Dis-
senters, 297; to Catholics, 312
Ren wick, James, 240, 241
' Resolutioners,' 228
Revenue, of Charles II., 20 ;
settlement of, under William
III., 87, 88
' Review,' the, 116
Reynolds, Edward, Bishop of
Norwich, 22
Rhine, River, 34, 71, 99, 120, 123,
124, 126, 178, 181, 209, 215
Rhode Island, 310
Richelieu, Armand Duplessis,
Cardinal de, 189
— , Louis Francois Armand du
Plessis, Due de, 200, 205, 206
Richmond, 166
Richmond, Duke of, see Lennox
Riot Act, 161, 312 and note
Robartes, John Robartes, 1st
Earl of, 25, 36
— , Lad}' Essex, 12
Robertson, Clan of, 267
— , Principal William, 279
Robethon, Jean, 160
Robinson, John, Bishop of Bristol,
140
Rob Roy, 256
Rochambeau, Jean Baptiste de
Vimeur, Comte de, 310
Rochefort, 205, 207, 215, 216
Rochester, 76
Rochester, Earl of, see Hyde
Rocoux, Battle of, 182
Rockingham, Marquis of ; see
Wentworth
Rodney, George Brydges, 1st
Lord Rodney, 184, 221, 314,
315, 316, 317 and note, 318 and
note, 319
ROERMONDE, 123
' ROGUEINGRAIN,' I55, I56
Rollo, Andrew, 5th Lord Rollo,
219
Rome, 262, 263, 264, 267
Rooke, Admiral Sir George, 127
Rossbach, 205
Rosebery, Earl of, see Primrose
Roscoff, 277
Rose, Alexander, Bishop of Edin-
burgh, 243
Rothes, Earl of, see Leslie
' Rottenburgh,' ' The Duke of,'
33i
Rouen, 31, 307
Royalists, the Scottish, 229
' Royal Scots,' the, 40 (note), 122
Royal Society, the, 14
Rullion Green, 236, 240
Rumbold, Richard, 54
Rupert, Prince, 14 and note; at
sea, 29, 30 and note, 34; 81, 82,
280
Ruskin, John, 187
Russell, Edward, Earl of Orford,
76, 84, 97, 98, 99
— , family of, 285, 296
— , John, 4th Duke of Bedford, 220
— , William, Lord Russell, 37, 40,
45, 53
, 5th Earl, 1st Duke of Bed-
ford, 67
Russia, George I. wants to fight,
162 ; subsidy Treaty with, 194,
197, 198 ; against Frederick,
197, 198, 204, 208 ; defeats
366
INDEX
Frederick at Kunersdorf, 215 ;
defeated at Liegnitz, 217; joins
Frederick, 221 ; leaves Freder-
ick, 223 ; Chatham seeks alliance
with, 294 ; in the Armed Neu-
trality of 1780, 307 ; Pitt's dread
of, 328, 338 and note
RUTHERGLEN, 237
RUTHVEN, 275
Ruvigny, Henri de, Earl of Gal-
way, 102, 128, 131
Ruyter, Michael Adrianzoon de,
29, 34
Rycot, 64
Rye House Plot, 19, 54, 239, 241
Ryswick, Peace of , 92, 103,106,107
Saale, River, 204, 205
' Sacharissa,' 58
Sacheverell, Dr. Henry, 113,
137 and note, 138, 139
Sackville, Lord George, after-
wards Lord George Germaine
(q.v.), 215, 217
St. Andrews, 232
St. Eustace, 317 and note, 319
St. Germains (Saint-Germain), 76,
107
St. James's, Palace of, 65, 70, 77
St. James's Square, 112
St. James's Street, 12; Park, 13
St. John, Henry, afterwards Vis-
count Bolingbroke, as Secretary
at War, 119 ; playing false, 131 ;
dismissed, 134 ; Secretary of
State, 139 ; character of, 139,
140 ; makes Peace of Utrecht,
142 ; a Free Trader, 144 ; on
Succession question, 147, 148 ;
155, 161, 167, 168; death of,
186 ; preparing for King James,
258, 259
St. Kitts, 192, 321
St. Lawrence, River, 189, 191,
210, 211, 212, 217
St. Lucia, 192, 220, 317, 321
St. Malo, 209, 277
St. Martin, 317
St. Omers (Saint-Omer), 41,
St. Paul's Cathedral, 27, 127
St. Petersburg, 338 (note)
St. Pierre, Island of, 224
Saint- Venant, 138
St. Vincent, 192, 317, 321
St. Winifred, 67
Saints, Isles of the, battle off, 318
and note
' Saints Rest ' (Baxter's), 15
Salisbury, 74, 76
Salisbury, Earl of, see Cecil
Salmon, Mrs., her waxworks, 165
Saltire, the Scottish, 254
Sambre, River, 101, 102, 130, 131,
132
' Samson Agonistes,' 13
Sancroft, William, Archbishop of
Canterbury, 63, 68, 71, 81, 83,
243
San Domingo, 192, 193, 330 (note)
Sandwich, Earl of, see Montagu
San Francisco, 192
Sanquhar, 238
Saratoga, 306
Sardinia, 158
Saunders, Admiral Sir Charles,
207, 210, 212, 213, 216, 223
Savannah, 309
Savile, George, Marquis of Hali-
fax, 5, 37 ; character of, 45 ; sup-
ports Charles, 46, 47; defeats Ex-
clusion Bill, 49 ; suggests arrest
of Shaftesbury, 53 ; intercedes
for Whigs, 55 ; in James II.'s
Cabinet, 58 ; protesting against
Catholics, 62 ; caution of, 70 ;
advising Presbyterians, 71 ; at
Hungerford, 75 ; in Convention,
77 ; suggests compromise, 79 ;
communicates with James, 86 ;
death of, 96 ; grandfather of
Chesterfield, 169
' Savoy,' the, Conference at, 22 ;
Jesuit school at, 65
Savoy, Victor Amadeus, Duke of,
98, 103, 104, 118
— gets Sicily, 143; a coming
Power, 159
Saxe, Hermann Maurice, Comte
de, Marshal, 181, 182, 185, 206,
264
Saxony, 197, 201, 217
Scarborough, 69
Scheldt, River, 33, 132, 144
Schellenberg, Battle of, 121, 125
Schism Act (1714), 140
Schomberg, Frederick Hermann,
Duke of, 33, 71
Schutz, Baron von, 146
Scilly Isles, 31
Scots-Dutch Regiments, 74, 242
Scott, Sir Walter, 235, 280
Scroggs, Sir William, Chief
Justice, 15, 48
Seaforth, Earl of, see Mackenzie
INDEX
367
Seafield, Earl of, see Ogilvy
Seamen's Registration Act, 132
' Sea Queen,' the, 187, 226
Secessions, Seceders (from
Kirk), 278, 279
Secret Service Money, 174
(note)
Sedgemoor, Battle of, 61
Sedley, Sir Charles, 13
Seignelay, J eanBaptiste, Marquis
de Seignelay (son of Colbert),
189
Selden, John, 45
Seneff, 234 and note
Senegal, 209, 210, 321
Senne, River, 101
Septennial Act, 17 16, 87
' Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life,' 150
Settlement, Laws of, 9 ; see also
Act of Settlement
Severn, River,. 124
Seymour, Charles, 6th Duke of
Somerset, 63, 147
— , Sir Edward, 62, 74
Sharp, James, Archbishop of St.
Andrews, 232, 234, 237, 238
Sheerness, 67
Shelburne, Earl of, see Petty
Sheldon, Gilbert, Archbishop, 22,
Sherborne, 74
Sheridan, Sir Thomas, 265
Sheriffmuir, Battle of, 261
Ship-building, 114
Shippen, William, 169
' Shoddy,' ii
Shovell, Sir Cloudesley, 98, 99,
131
Shrewsbury, Duke of, see Talbot
Sicilies, Kingdom of the Two,
104, 105
Sicily, 130, 143, 144, 159, 163,
173
Sidney, Algernon, 36, 38, 40, 53,
54
— , Henry, 1st Earl of Romney, 58,
70
Silesia, 176, 177, 183, 194, 205,
217, 223
Silk Trade, 10
'Sinking Fund,' Walpole's, 171;
Pitt's, 329
Skirving, Alexander, 268
Slave Trade, ii, 328, 330 and
note
Sluys, 33
Smith, Adam, 280, 291, 292, 297,
307 (note), 328 J
Smugglers, 70
'Smuggleton,' East and West, 155
Smuggling in America, 289, 292
— , Pitt's measures against, 328
Smyrna, 100
Society for Promoting Chris-
tian Knowledge, 112
Society for Propagation of
Gospel, 112
Society for Reformation of
Manners, 112
Soldier, legal position of a, 94
Solebay, Battle of, 29, 242
Solms, Count Heinrich, 101
Somers, John, Lord Somers, 96,
134. 137
Somerset, County of, 60, 61
Somerset, Duke of, see Seymour
Somerset House, 43
Sophia, Electress of Hanover, 65,
73, 81 and note, 95, 108, 109;
death of, 145
Sophia Dorothea, Queen of
George I., 151
, Queen of Prussia, 152
South, Dr. Robert, 14
Southampton, Earl of, see Wri-
othesley
South Sea Bubble, 163
Southwold, 29, 34
Sovereignty, problem of, 109
Spain, designs of England and
France against, 33 ; suggested
alliance with, 38, 39 ; Peace at
expense of, 41 ; Oates in, 41 ;
League of Augsburg with, 60 ;
joins Grand Alliance, 98 ;
Succession question of, 104,
105; campaigns in, 120, 127,
128 ; French get hold of (1709),
139; chances of French Union
with, 141 ; her cessions at Peace
of Utrecht, 142; her Monarchy
reduced, 144 ; natural ally of
France, 158 ; discontent of, 159 ;
wants to restore James III.,
163 ; her fleet defeated, 163 ;
allied with Austria, 165 ; allied
with France, 172 ; exercises
right of search, 172 ; tries to
keep America shut, 173 ; her
war with England (1738), 173,
174 ; attacks Austria (1741),
177; France helps, 178, 180;
her fleets beaten, 184 ; her
3 68
INDEX
American Colonies, 192 ; the old
Colonial Power, 193 ; jealous
of France, 193 ; Pitt's offers to,
205 ; France hopes to use Fleet
of, 210; begins to growl, 218;
Pitt wishes to attack, 218, 219,
221 ; her Treaty with France
(1761), 220 ; declares war, 220 ;
beaten at Havana and Manila
222 ; makes Peace, 224 ; the
Darien Scheme and, 250; James
III. hopes for supplies from,
260 ; James III. goes to, 263 ;
claims Falkland Isles, 296 ; de-
clares war on England (1779),
307, 308, 313 ; her Admirals,
314 ; blockades Gibraltar, 315,
316 ; beaten by Rodney, 315 ;
designs on Jamaica, 318 ; re-
covers Minorca and Florida, 321;
desires to keep mare clausum
at Vancouver, 338
Spanish America, 163, 172, 173,
185, 192 ; see also America
Central, America South
'Spectator,' the, 115
Spencer, Charles, 3rd Earl of
Sunderland, 131, 139, 160, 162
(note), 163, 164, 183
— , Robert, 2nd Earl of Sunder-
land, 45, 47 ; in James' Cabinet,
58 ; on Ecclesiastical Commis-
sion, 63 ; cursed by Anne, 68 ;
persuades James, 72 ; dismissed,
73 ; sneaks back, 97
Spratt, Thomas, Bishop of
Rochester, 63
Stade, 204
Stafford, Viscount, see Howard
Stair, Earl of, see Dalrymple
Stahremberg, Guidobald, Count
von, 134
Stamp Act (1712), 140
(in America), 290, 291, 292,
293. 294, 300
— Duty (English), 297
Stanhope, James, Viscount, 1st
Earl Stanhope, 127, 134, 160,
161, 163, 164, 165, 259
— , Philip Dormer, 4th Earl of
Chesterfield, 160, 165, 169
— , William, 1st Earl of Harring-
ton, 170
Start Point, 73
Statute of Distributions, 15
Frauds, 15
Tumultuous Petitions, 20
Statutes against Heresy, repeal
of, 15
Steam Engine, 280
Steele, Sir Richard, 96, 112, 115
Steinkirk, Battle of, 94, 101, 102
Stevens waert, 123
Stewart, Clan of, 260, 266
Stewart, Robert, Viscount Castle-
reagh, 86
Stillingfleet, Edward, 15
Stirling, 243, 260, 267, 273, 274
Stock Exchange, 113
Stollhofen, 125, 126
Strafford, Earl of, see Went-
worth
Strangers' Gallery, the, 333
Stuart, John, Earl of Bute, 218,
220, 222, 223, 225, 287
Sudbury, 332
Sunderland, Earls of, see Spencer
— , Lady, 58, 70
Sussex, 237
Sweden, Treaty of 1668 with, 32 ;
lends troops to William III., 74 ;
hostile to Prussia, 197, 204 ;
France hopes to use Fleet of,
210; James III. hopes for sup-
plies from, 260 263
Swedes in British Colonies, 189
Swift, Dr. Jonathan, 115, 116,
139, 153
Switzerland, 19, 54
Synods, 230
*
Talbot, Charles, 12th Earl, after-
wards Duke of Shrewsbury, 67,
70. 147. M»
— , Richard, Earl of Tyrconnel, 59
Tallard, Camille d'Hostun,
Comte de, Marshal, 124, 125, 126
Tangier, 9, 17, 26, 61
' Tape and Sealing-Wax
Office,' 155
Tariffs, wars of, 90
Taunton, 61
Taylor, Frank, 179 (note)
Temple, Earl, see Grenville
— , Sir William, 45, 115
Tesse, Mans Jean Baptiste Rene,
Comte de, Marshal, 132
Test Act, of 1673, 35, 62, 65 ; of
1675, 39
, the Scottish (of 1681),
238, 239
Tests, the Sacramental, 23, 25
Texel, Island of, 29
Thackeray, William Makepeace,
INDEX
369
' Esmond,' 147, 257 ; ' The
Virginians,' 195
Thames, River, highway of Lon-
don, 12 ; reception of the
Bishops on the, 69 ; Dart-
mouth's fleet in, 72 ; James
throws Great Seal into, 76 ;
boatmen of the, 132 ; frozen,
135
Theatre, immorality of the, 112,
153
Threadneedle Street, ' Old
Lady of,' 93
Throne, vacancy of the, 79
Thuringia, 204
Thurlow, Edward, 1st Lord
Thurlow, 319, 323, 324, 337
Ticonderoga, 197, 208, 2ii, 305
Tillotson, John, Archbishop of
Canterbury, 83, 96
Tobago, 192, 220, 224, 318, 321
' Toby,' ' My Uncle,' 100, 102
Toleration Act, 87
Tollemache, Thomas, 102, 103
Tonge, Israel, 41
Tooke, John Home-, 332
Topsham, 74
Torbay, 73, 242, 316
TORGAU, 217
Tories, origin of Party of, 47 ;
attitude of (1685-8), 56, 57, 58,
60, 62, 68, 74 ; in William IIL's
reign, 78, 79 ; denounce Army,
94 ; denounce favoixrites, 95 ;
denounce Whigs, 96 ; elections
favour, 97, 106 ; partisan con-
duct of, 115, 116; leaning to
peace (1706), 130-42 ; cry for
the Church, 131, 135, 138 ; up-
hold Mrs. Hill, 135 ; and Dr.
Sacheverell, 137, 138 ; in the
Ministry, 139, 140 ; conclude
Peace of Utrecht, 142 ; are
free traders, 144 ; on the Suc-
cession question, 145, 146 ; are
beaten, 147, 148 ; sources of
power, 147 ; exclusion of the
(17 14), 154 ; began corruption,
155; meaning of word in Scot-
land, 231 ; reputation of the
Scottish, 235 ; changed meaning
of name of (George III.), 284
and note
Torture, use of, in Scotland, 239
and note, 240
Torrington, Earl of, see Herbert
Toulon, French fleet at, 29, 85,
VOL. Ill
98, 120, 131, 132, 134, 180, 207,
215, 216, 306
TOURNAI, I36
Tourville, Anne Hilarion do
Costentin, Comte de, 84, 98, 99
Tower Hill, a model ship of
war on, 313 (note)
Tower, the, the Seven Bishops
sent to, 69 ; Marlborough sent
to, 96 ; Oxford sent to, 161
Towneley, Francis, 271, 277
Townshend, Charles, 2nd Vis-
count Townshend, 160, 162,
164, 294, 295
— , George, 1st Marquis Towns-
hend, 210
Trafalgar, Battle of, 318 (note)
Transports, 121
Trarbach, 127
Treason, trials for, 16 ; Law of,
strained, 53, 54 ; Act of 1696 on,
87 ; Law of English, extended
to Scotland, 256, 262, 277
Treasurer, Office of the Lord, 147
Treasury, Office of the, 89
Trelawney, Sir Jonathan,
Bishop of Bristol, 68
Trenton, 305
Triennial Act (1641), 20 (1694),
87 ; another suggested, 333
Trier, 127, 128
Trinidad, 192
' Triple Alliance ' (of 1668),
the, 32
' Tubney,' 21
Tullibardine, Marquis of, see
Murray
Turkey, fighting Austria, 98 ;
Eugene fighting, 119 ; George,
Elector of Hanover, fighting
against, 151 ; Russian hostility
to, 338
Turner, Francis, Bishop of Ely, 68
Turnpikes, 8, 114
Tuscany, 175
Tyburn, 12, 113, 161
Tynemouth, 121
Tyrconnel, Earl of, see Talbot
Tyre, 187
Uist, South, Island of, 265
Ulm, 124
Uniformity, Act of (1662), 23
Union, of England and Scotland,
under Cromwell, 227 ; of the
two Crowns, 248 ; scheme for
Union in Charles II., 248 ; in
24
370
INDEX
William III., 251, 252 ; Com-
missioners to Treat for, 252,
253 ; the real agents in the, 253,
254 ; the Union carried, 255 ;
was it necessary ?, 255, 256 ; un-
popular, 256 ; possibilities of
a Federal, 255, 256 ; violation
of its terms, 257 ; Charles
Edward denounces, 270
United States of America (see
also America), declared Inde-
pendent, 300 ; recognized by-
France, 307 ; by Britain, 322 ;
Pitt wishes for free trade with,
328
Universities, the Scottish, 247,
279
University College, Oxford, 64
USHANT, 315
Utrecht, Peace of, 142, 143, 144,
145, 157, 158, 163, 191, 224
Valencia, 127, 128
Valley Forge, 309
Vancouver, 338
Vane, Sir Harry, 18, 19
Vaudreuil, Louis Philippe de
Rigaud, Marquis de, 213, 217,
• 218
Vauxhall, 13, 76
Velasco, Don Diego, 222
Vellinghausen, 221
Vendome, Louis Joseph, Due de,
132, 133, 134
Venice, 187
Venloo, 123
Vergennes, Charles Gravier,
Comte de, 306, 307, 308, 313,
320, 322
Verney, John, 19
Vernon, Admiral Edward, 174,
177
Versailles, 320, 322 ; Peace of,
321, 322
Victoria the Great, 52, 108,
325
Vienna 117
Vilaine, River, 216
Villars, Claude Louis Hector,
Due de, Marshal, 135, 136, 138,
142
Villa Viciosa, 134
Villeroy, Francois de Neufville,
Due de, Marshal, 123, 124, 125,
128, 129
Villiers, George, 1st Duke of
Buckingham, 31
Villiers, George, 2nd Duke of
Buckingham, 31, 33, 37
Virginia, 188, 193, 195, 196,
280, 292, 300, 309, 310
Volunteers, the Scottish Whig
(1745), 268
Waal, River, 123
Wade, George, Marshal, 181, 263,
269, 271, 272, 273
Wages, in seventeenth century, 8
Wakeman, Sir George, 48
Walcheren, 33
' Walnut-Tree Walk,' 161
Walpole, Horace, afterwards 4th
Earl of Orford, 289, 301, 302
— , Sir Robert, afterwards 1st
Earl of Orford, as Secretary at
War, 119; on George L, 151 ;
in Office, 160 ; in Opposition
(171 7), 162 ; denouncing Gov-
ernment, 163 ; returns to Office,
164 ; the sources of his power,
164 ; his weak foreign policy,
165 ; announces death of
George L, 166 ; gets hold of
George II., 167 ; the Opposition
to, 169, 170; his courage, skill
and finance, 170, 171 ; his
defeat on Excise Bill, 172 ;
Should he have gone to war
( T 733) ?. J 7 2 ; tries to compro-
mise with Spain, 173 ; fall and
death of, 174 ; subsidizes Maria
Theresa, 177; neglects Army,
178; defends Carteret, 180;
Pelham compared to, 181 ; Pitt's
hostility to, 199 ; his neglect of
Army, 263 ; purchasing a ma-
jority, 285 ; would not tax
Colonies, 290 ; on Excise and
Sinking Fund, 329
Walsh, Anthony, 265
Walters, Lucy, 52
Wandewash, Battle of, 217
Wandsworth, 114
Warburg, 217
War Office, stupidity of, 196,
290 (note)
Washington, George, 195, 196, 300,
303. 3°4> 305. 309, 3io» 314. 322
Waterloo, Battle of, 129
Watt, James, 280
Webb, General John Richmond,
126
Wellesley, Arthur, 1st Duke of
Wellington, 64, 86
INDEX
37i
Wellington, Duke of. See Welles-
ley.
Welsh, John, 234
Wemyss, David, Lord Elcho, 269
— , James, 4th Earl of Wemyss, 269
Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of
Strafford, 31, 45, 174, 232
— , family of, 285
— , Charles Watson, 2nd Marquis
of Rockingham, 293, 294, 296,
319, 320, 323
Weser, River, 204
Wesley, John, 290
West Indies, buccaneers in, 100 ;
Spanish, 104 ; 114; expeditions
to (171 1), 121 ; French and
English rivalry in, 157, 158 ;
the French, 189, 192 ; the
British, 192 ; the Spanish, 192 ;
the French contrasted with
British, 193 ; French seizure of
Guadeloupe, 209 ; of Dominica,
219 ; of Martinique, 220, 221 ;
of Grenada, Tobago, St. Lucia
and Marie Galante, 220 ; re-
storation of some of them, 224 ;
the Spanish, in danger, 220 ;
England attacks, 221, 222 ; at
Peace of Paris, 224 ; garrison
in, 301 ; France will seize, 307,
308 ; French driven to, 309,
316 ; Hood in the, 311 ; our
trade to, 313 ; our squadron in,
314 ; France covets, 314 ; and
grabs, 317, 318 ; Rodney in,
317, 318 ; at the Peace of 1783,
321 ; the French, 307, 317, 318,
321 ; the Dutch, 317 and note ;
jealousy of merchants of, 330 ;
slave insurrections in, 330 (note)
Westminster Abbey, 226
— Assembly, 234
— Confession, the, 228, 247
— , Convention of, 197, 198
— Hall, 138
— School, 65
Westphalia, 201, 202, 209, 215,
217 ; Peace of, 144
Westpoint, 310
Wharton, Philip, 4th Lord Whar-
ton, 37
— , Thomas, 1st Marquis of
Wharton, 66, 134
' Wheel-Engines,' 106
Whetstone, 90
Whigs, origin of, 35, 36, 37 ;
factiousness of, 41, 44, 45, 46 ;
called Petitioners, 47 ; com-
pared to a fish, 48 ; at Oxford
Parliament, 49, 50, 51 ; pre-
pared for Civil War, 52 ; Charles
takes vengeance on, 53, 54 ;
attitude of (1685-8), 56, 60, 61,
65, 67, 70 ; triumph of, at
Revolution, 78 ; not complete,
79, 80; support the war, 115,
116; dominate Ministry, 131,
J 34» 135 ; refuse offers of
Peace, 135, 137 ; impeach
Sacheverell, 137, 138 ; dismissed
from office, 139; repeal Tory
Acts, 140 ; regain power, 147,
148 ; source of their power,
147 ; character and aims of the
Party of, 153, 154, 155, 156,
157 ; fighting Jacobites, 161 ;
discontent of some, 164, 169 ;
meaning of word in Scotland,
231 ; the Scottish triumph of,
244 ; the bitterness of, 245 ; com-
mercial views of, 249 ; at date of
Union, 253 ; playing with repeal
of the Union, 257 ; the best of
the Scottish, 259 ; Volunteers in
Edinburgh, 268 ; Glasgow for
the, 273 ; clans in Highlands,
274, 275 (note) ; in George
III.'s reign, family groups of,
284, 285, 286 ; shifting meaning
of name, 284 (note) ; American
rebels use name of, 291, 300 ;
split into ' Old ' and ' New,' 293 ;
Ministry of Old, 293 ; Burke,
champion of Old, 294 ; in
opposition to North, 296 ; ex-
pecting despotism, 301 ; pre-
paring anarchy, 302, 303 ;
adopt Rebels' colours, 303 ;
neglect economic reform, 323 ;
their strength in the rotten
boroughs, 333 ; defeat Pitt's
Reform Bill, 335 ; favour Prince
of Wales, 336
White, Thomas, Bishop of Peter-
borough, 68
Whitehall, 5, 30, 65, 73, 76,
83. 234
' White Rose,' the, 263
' Whole Duty of Man,' The, 15
WlGAN, 27I
Wight, Isle of, battle off (1666), 30
Wightman, General Joseph, 263
Wigs, 149
Wigton, 240
372
INDEX
Wilberforce, William, 330
Wilkes, John, 287, 288 and note,
289, 295, 296, 333
Wilkins, Dr. John, 14
WlLLEMSTHAL, 223
William III., 21; as Prince of
Orange : saves Holland, 34 ;
marries Mary, 35, 39 ; candi-
date for throne, 46 ; visits
Charles, 52 ; Charles allied
with, 55 ; his hatred of Louis
XIV., 59 ; ' not a Whig,' 60 ;
against Monmouth, 60 ; in
touch with English parties, 66 ;
his preparations, 67, 68 ; on
birth of Prince James, 69, 70 ;
invited to England, 70, 71 ;
starts for England, 71, 72 ; his
Declaration, 73 ; his voyage, 73 ;
and landing, 74 ; advances on
Exeter, 74 ; on Hungerford, 75 ;
on London, 76 ; James's at-
tempt to assassinate, 76 ; as
Prince of Orange, invited to
London, calls Assembly and
Convention, 77 ; ' K. William
or K. Lewis,' 78 ; as King, 79 ;
necessary to Whigs, 80 ; writes
to Sophia, 81 ; his descent, 81
(note) ; leaves Mary Regent, 82,
83, 97, 99 ; character of, 84,
85 ; attitude of Englishmen to,
86, 96, 97, 106, 108 ; revenue
of, 88 ; feelings of, 94 ; accus-
tomed to treachery, 96 ; par-
dons Sunderland, 97 ; selects
Ministers, 97 ; goes to Flanders,
97 ; makes Grand Alliance, 98 ;
in Ireland, 99 ; at Steinkirk,
1 01 ; in London, 102 ; retakes
Namur, 103 ; makes Peace,
103 ; encourages Marlborough,
103 (note) ; on Spanish Suc-
cession, 105 ; makes Partition
Treaties, 105 ; his Army re-
duced, 106 ; gets the game
in his hands, 107 ; death of,
108 ; snubs Prince George
of Denmark, III J muzzles
Convocation, 112 ; his aims
attained, 144 ; Carteret inherits
policy of, 167 ; at Battle of
Seneff, 234 and note ; asked to
call Scottish Convention, 242 ;
proclaimed at Edinburgh, ne-
gotiates with Bishops, 243 ;
neglects Scotland, 245 ; trusts
Dalrymple, 245 ; his responsi-
bility for Glencoe, 245, 246 ;
trusts Carstairs, 246 ; de jure
oath, 247 ; his Commissioners
in Scottish Parliaments, 249 ;
deceives Scotland on the Darien
Scheme, 250; desires a Union,
252
William, Duke of Cumberland,
son of George II., 182, 184, 195,
201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 222 ; (in
1745-6), 271, 272, 273, 274, 275
William, Duke of Gloucester, son
of Queen Anne, 81, 95, 108, 109
Willis, Dr. Thomas, 14
Wilmington, Lord, see Compton
Windham, William, 335
Windsor, no, 124, 282, 283 .
Windward Islands, see West
Indies
Witchcraft, 279
Wolfe, James, 199 (note), 207,
208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214
Wood, Antony, 14, 50
Woods and Forests Office, 19
Woodstock, 127
Woolsthorpe, 14
Worcester, Battle of, 55, 229,
234. 239
Wren, Sir Christopher, 27, 127,
138
Wright, Alderman William, 51
Wriothesley, Thomas, 4th Earl
of Southampton, 25
Wycherley, William, 13
Wyndham, Charles, 2nd Earl of
Egremont, 222
— , Sir William, 145, 168
Yarmouth, 33
Yorke, Philip, 1 st Earl of Hard-
wicke, 164, 170, 177, 185, 204, 290
Yorkshire, 75
Yorktown, 311, 318 and note
Ypres, 130
Yssel, River, 34
Zoological Gardens, the, 138
ZORNDORFF, 208
Zulestein, William Henry, after-
wards 1st Earl of Rochford, 66
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld. } London and Aylesbury.
m
DA
30
F54
1905
v.3
Fletcher, Charles Robert
Leslie
An introductory history
of England
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
TVNews
OpenLibrary